26 feet tall, 5,000 pounds, 647 leaves: How a pink tree in new Boise park was designed
On the corner of 11th and Bannock streets stands a pink metal tree on a small hill in Cherie Buckner-Webb Park. It quickly has become a crowd favorite.
Designing and constructing such a mammoth sculpture, which allows people to swing leisurely on three benches hanging from it, required a lot of creativity.
This new art piece, called Gentle Breeze, was devised by Matthew Mazzotta and sits in the new urban park, which opened last week.
“We really wanted something that was going to be unique and authentic and become an iconic place in West Boise,” said Karl LeClair, Boise’s public art program manager. “It somehow captures the vibe of Boise.”
And the designers wanted the sculpture to last. They designed it to withstand earthquakes, 90 mph wind and even a storm that coats everything in thick ice.
“When it comes to an art sculpture,” said Bryan Starr, the structural engineer for the project, “there’s not necessarily a building code.”
The metal tree is about 26 feet tall, 33 feet at its widest point in the canopy, and sits on a hill around 3-5 feet above the street. It weighs roughly 5,000 pounds. In an ice storm, Starr said, it’s designed to hold another 2,000 pounds without breaking.
A BOISE DESIGN BUILT TO LAST BY A NEW YORKER
Mazzotta, who grew up in Canton, New York, and his team put living room furniture alongside 8th Street between Main and W. Idaho streets in January 2020. For five hours, passers-by sat and talked about Boise.
These “outdoor living rooms” were a part of his process to get a feeling for a location, Mazzotta told the Idaho Statesman. It’s also, according to LeClair, part of the reason Mazzotta was chosen as the artist to design the $350,000 sculpture.
From talking to people, Mazzotta realized that Boiseans love how livable the city is and how easy it is to get outdoors and into nature, even on a lunch break.
There was also, he said, “the fear of losing what was on the outside.”
For his sculpture, this was a fear Mazzotta shared. One of his earlier ideas involved a moving house, where people could see different views from the windows. He realized that, with Boise growing so fast, he couldn’t guarantee that a view of the mountains wouldn’t just turn into a view of a building.
Instead, he wanted to bring nature into the city. A tree swing felt rural to him, especially if the tree was on a hill, he said. The swings help draw people into the experience, and the leaves, made of metal and fluttering in the wind, respond to a natural breeze otherwise blocked by buildings.
Public comments collected in June 2020 about the final tree design and another option, said LeClair, overwhelmingly favored Gentle Breeze. People were excited about the “fun and whimsical and playful aspect of it,” he said.
The biggest difficulty, said Mazzotta, was choosing the color. He wanted it to be bold and modern, and he didn’t want it to look like it was pretending to be a real tree. “It took us like a month and a half to find that pink,” he said.
The team went through hundreds of shades and brought paint swatches to the site. They ended with a warm pink, with a bit of yellow in it.
UNIQUE PARK SCULPTURE PRESENTS UNIQUE PROBLEMS
On top of the pink tree are about 647 equally pink leaves, said Kevin Manning, the sculpture’s fabricator. Each are around one foot in diameter and a third of a pound.
The leaves are covered with a glossy paint — the type used for cars — and each hangs at a slightly different angle, Mazzotta said. That way, he said, the “pink will change all day long” as the light nearby shifts.
Starr guessed that the leaves start moving at wind speeds of only 5 or 10 miles per hour.
The leaves are aluminum, so they’re light, but the designers didn’t want them to be loud when they ruffle.
“If you have metal on metal,” said Manning, “you’d have this god-awful noise.”
They used a nylon bearing to ease the clatter when the leaves move, he said.
The three swings, which can each hold about 600 pounds and are a bit more than 4 feet wide, were also difficult to design. Originally, said LeClair, Mazzotta wanted the benches to have their sides to the trunk as they swung, instead of their back.
After an engineer said “this isn’t going to work,” the designing team retooled, and chose a special mechanism to allow people to swing without hitting the trunk or endangering themselves. A spring slows the bench down if people get too far in the air.
Mazzotta said he went to a playground and sat on a swing, and “I figured out exactly how far you go back-and-forth before it actually becomes a swing, where you take your feet up,” he said. The answer was 9 inches in each direction.
Cherie Buckner-Webb, the park’s namesake, told KTVB before the park’s dedication that the sculpture is “such a beautiful piece of art, and yet it’s so welcoming. It’s the epitome of the Boise that I believe in.”
When he heard this quote, Mazzotta said he remembered thinking, “Wow, that’s a compliment.”
“I felt like we had hit the nail on the head,” he said.
