SEGD_Design - (Page 60) Below: On the recreated Whipple Arch Truss footbridge, interpretives on layered glass and phenolic resin panels tell the stories of legendary canal-era personalities. Right: Five of the wharf’s wooden planks were replaced with cast-stainless steel sculptural elements that also depict colorful Buffalo personalities. historic fabric, we probably would have done a more reposed interpretive program, one that blended in with the landscape and became embedded,” Helmetag notes. “But since we were literally building on a vacant lot, it was the inverse. All the interpretive elements were created with the vision that they would lend back scale and, in a sculptural way, define what might have been there.” The site’s primary identification signage needed to harken back to the canal era and establish a sense of place. An 1800s broadside advertising passenger traffic on the canal provided inspiration. C&G borrowed the typography for 4-ft.-high can letters spelling Commercial Slip (the harbor’s historic name), attached to the I-Beam railroad bridge over the canal. Atop the bridge, four glass interpretive panels with embedded, laminated graphics afford views of the canal while depicting what visitors would have seen before Buffalo was founded, during the early days of the canal, during its peak, and finally, during the railroad era after it began falling into disrepair. But the site’s most arresting piece is the four-story interpretive façade that evokes a canal-era warehouse and the bustling commerce it spawned. Framed in marine-grade stainless steel, its bottom third consists of a huge canal route map embedded in polycarbonate and sandwiched between ½-in. sheets of DuPont SentryGlas. Above the map, mounted on a stainless steel tracery of “bricks,” nine lightboxes project vintage photo images of the tradespeople who would have occupied the warehouse lofts. Close by, atop a small rise overlooking the ruins of old canal warehouses, C&G sited an evocative doorway that supports additional glass interpretive panels, these illustrating what the port looked like during its busiest years. On the footbridge, four more interpretive panels tell the stories of legendary Buffalo personalities on glass and phenolic resin panels, while on the wharf itself, five cast stainless steel planks also depict historical figures. Creating the proper scale for the heroically-proportioned interpretive elements—essentially graphic traceries of the past—was critical to the success of the project, says Louis Allen, vice president/creative director for Adirondack Studios, the primary fabricator. “Our studio comes out of the theatrical trade, so we’re used to working at very large scale. To get it right, we did a lot of prototyping to determine the proper proportions for everything.” Despite some initial negative reaction from local partnering agencies and the public (attributed primarily to an incremental installation schedule), the harbor is enjoying increased traffic and Buffalo has high hopes. “Our goal was to convey the great history of the canal and its importance to the region, and do that in an intriguing way,” says Jordan Levy, chairman of the board of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., a subsidiary of New York’s chief economic development agency. “We were certainly successful in that respect, and we believe the redeveloped Inner Harbor will have a lasting impact on Buffalo’s continuing revival.” ERIE CANAL INNER HARBOR Clients: Empire State Development Corp., Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. Architects: Flynn Battaglia Architects (project architect), Mathews Neilson Landscape Architects (landscape architects), John Milner Associates (historic preservation architects) Exhibition Design: C&G Partners Design Team: Keith Helmetag (partnerin-charge); Justine Gaxotte (senior graphic designer); Brandon Downing (writer/content coordinator); Cigdem Tanik, Thomas McMahon (exhibit architects) Fabrication: Adirondack Studios (primary interpretive fabricator), Jan Spoerri & Co. (models and castings), Systeme Huntingdon (phenolic resin panels), Stephen Alcorn (woodcut prints), Alex Reardon (historical cartography); DuPont (SentryGlas), Prelco (laminated glass graphics) Photos: Richard Barnes segdDESIGN 57
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