On Tuesday morning, a crew was hard at work in the Gene Leahy Mall, installing new steel benches created for a public art project called Take a Seat.
On Tuesday afternoon, a cleaning crew was hard at work wiping off the black-marker scrawl on one of those benches.
A vandal, presumably named Cassandra, wrote “Cassandra Loves Richard” on a creatively named seat called “B3nch” barely four hours after it was placed.
The piece that was defaced is a bright orange abstract bench created by Brian and Andrea Kelly. The bench's geometric angles are meant to mirror triangular shapes atop a nearby building.
The crew was able to remove all the writing from the bench, although it took a while.
“I'd sure like to find this Cassandra person,” said a clearly annoyed Joe Gudenrath, executive director of the Omaha Downtown Improvement District, the group behind the project.
Gudenrath had good reason to be angry, because each of the benches had been custom-designed by 13 of the region's leading architectural and engineering firms.
Their creativity was apparent on Tuesday. “Croak,” for instance, is in the shape of a giant green amphibian. It was designed by Jim Classe of Prochaska and Associates and is near the corner of 10th and Farnam Streets, next to the mall's popular playground and slides.
The heavy-steel bench, at about 400 pounds, has two main pieces. A curvy pink tongue, complete with a decorative fly at one end, is the actual bench. The tongue is attached to the sculpture of a big green frog.
The entire structure sits on top of a kid-safe synthetic rubber lily pad and pond.
“Our inspiration was to create a bench that looked as if it had just crawled out of the lagoon looking for food,” said Classe, who was at the mall Tuesday overseeing the installation.
Bench creators were required to follow a few guidelines. Their benches had to be engineer-certified to support the weight of at least two people. They had to be treated with an anti-graffiti coating, which came in handy Tuesday.
Designs also had to discourage the homeless from napping. Most of the benches, therefore, feature sharp angles or curves.
But architects were otherwise free to indulge their imaginations, and most created functional art.
Vanessa Schutte, of DRL Group, wanted her bench to have a Nebraska theme. So she designed “Goldenrod,” named for the state flower.
The work, at the corner of 14th and Douglas Streets across from the W. Dale Clark Library, consists of six small, canary-yellow curved wedges.
The Downtown Improvement District provided $10,000 for installation of the benches, with in-kind and technical support coming from the Omaha Public Art Commission and the City of Omaha. A public dedication for the benches will be May 27.
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and its director, Mark Masuoka, gave artistic advice. It's perhaps no surprise that many of the designs stretch the notion of what a bench should look like.
That's certainly the case with “Rebar,” architect Randy Brown's design, which is immediately across from the library on 14th Street.
His bench, which looks somewhat like a bike rack, consists of a series of looped rebars, which are steel reinforcing rods for concrete and masonry.
Contact the writer:
444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com
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