One Percent
Public Art in the Age of Private Development
by Gabrielle Printz
Stephen Galloway, Element: Grove, 2018. A frit glass facade commissioned for a new office building that now hosts the genetic test kit company 23andme. Per the art consultant Chandra Cerrito, “the artwork identifies this new corporate campus as both unique and inspired by its past. Emphasized by scale, Element: Grove is an encounter with nature and agriculture, and a reminder of the historical layers to the space.”
Driving Southeast on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, California, you might catch glimpses of unassuming sculptures out your passenger side window. They decorate parking lots, shopping plazas, and the frontages of commercial buildings. Bronze-leaf palm trees fail to shade the In-n-Out drive-through,1 a fountain of exuberant steel figures in primary colors marks the Tesla dealership,2 one of a suite of mosaic obelisks announces a Sweetgreen.3 Integrated into the walkable and drivable areas of the shopping center, these works naturalize a landscape of suburban consumption: unnamed counterparts to brand name signage. It’s less the “museum without walls” of public art administrator fantasy, misinterpreted from Malraux, than it is some late-capitalist reprisal of what Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi observed in Las Vegas decades earlier, now built on the participation of artists and designers in laundering capitalist space into cultural space.
Whether this creep of public art into commercial real estate is symptomatic of a larger pattern of arts-facilitated development in the US, or is at home in the particular cultural jurisdiction of Silicon Valley, artists engaging in public work are increasingly doing so on behalf of private clients rather than municipal agencies. Many recent additions to the collection of public art overseen by the Sunnyvale Arts Commission have largely appeared in office parks and “campuses” built and occupied by tech companies: Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, among others, are the chief residents, employers, and property developers of the conurbation that includes Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Cupertino. In fact, a majority of the public art commissioned since the program’s inception in 1990 has been the product of the 2012 city-mandated public art requirement for new construction. Art in Private Development (AIPD)–elsewhere referred to as Percent for Public Art–designates one percent of a privately developed project’s construction costs to the commission or acquisition of public-facing artworks, or an equivalent donation to the Public Art Program.4 Art, as what belongs to the public, is reconceived here as a fraction of the building that belongs to private interests.
A policy document for the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) further adjusts the language of what is meant by “public” through this legislated dependency on private capital, in a definition that leaves the subject of the public behind to instead qualify appropriate public processes:
While a layman's definition of public art may be "art installed in public spaces," public art is more than that. State arts agencies and public art practitioners stress that public art is a product of community investment and stakeholder dialogue that doesn't just occupy but also actively shapes public space.5
The language of finance capital too has been naturalized in idyllic processes of city planning. A community is rendered a site of investment, and its stakeholders (whoever they might be6) are appointed to “actively shape public space.”
Future Forms, Cosmos, Intuitive Surgical, 2021. Unlisted in the Sunnyvale Public Art Archive, though it has its own “place” page on Google Maps.
As architects have become involved in the provision of small scale, yet “placemaking” works under these terms, percent for art programs have orchestrated tighter relations between economies of architectural practice and larger movements of financial capital that adjust the form and use of the built environment to the needs of Silicon Valley corporations and tech-class commuters. Small design firms like Future Forms, Softlab, Snarkitecture, THEVERYMANY and others who depend on such commissions to deliver a genre of digitally-fabricated environmental artworks find suitable partners in city agencies and the private companies and developers within their jurisdictions, subject to percent-for-art requirements. Taking a smaller cut of the conventional 8% of construction costs for architectural services, here rendered as artistic services, it further narrows design into value-added supplements to work that would otherwise proceed without the contributions of such designers.
Far from the WPA-era subsidies for art and cultural infrastructure delivered through programs that gave artists opportunities to work during the Depression, public art has become alienated from the cultural and material value of artistic labor and its civic products. Even as that legacy is renewed and repackaged in the text of Public Arts Master Plans and ensuing Requests For Qualifications (RFQ), opportunities to work in the public interest have become more solidly tethered to asset-making at increasing scales, in service to more frictionless processes of development and the greater financialization of the built environment.
In the same NASAA policy document, “artistic development”–investment in a creative class–is immediately linked to a presiding interest in economic development:
Beyond providing employment and artistic opportunities for artists and craftsmen, public art can offer economic benefits to the broader community. When labor, materials and services are secured locally, an installation's economic footprint may extend far beyond the artist's bottom line. Once completed, public art installations may attract residents and visitors and contribute to ongoing economic productivity. According to the National Governors Association, "The question of how to foster high-quality places is one of the most important in economic development today. By providing amenities, connectivity, and sense of place, public art and well designed public spaces can be part of the answer."7
Not far from Sergio Ferro’s claim in the 1970s that architects are merely “courtiers of capital,” artists and designers have largely situated their contributions to the public as valuable in ways that are external to or more than the simple work of building.8 What is developed, creatively, in a larger economic process of development, is the pursuit of autonomy from those presiding structures of capital—an autonomy that is never possible.
Capitalizing on the call to deliver what has already been allocated, by the Arts Commission, to the public interest, what the architect-artist gains is the opportunity to experiment formally or technically without deference to the occupational standards and programmatic requirements that an architect would otherwise have to design for. Gestures to imagined publics, claims of site specificity, overtures to the experience of art outside of its familiar institutions appear routinely in proposals that ultimately provide something to look at in lieu of access to commercial property. Responding firms wittingly or unwittingly mirror the language of the RFQ to earn a commission that can only reproduce the developer’s idea of the public and what it deserves. One percent for public art–whether commissioned by the private company or enrolled onto the public art register–is the prize for total capitulation by architects to those who actually exert power over the built environment.
So, what does it mean to “placemake” at Lockheed Martin Way?9 Who is the landscaped path at the Googleplex for? Who gets to enjoy visual access to corporate sculpture? And what is lost in the process of gaining this recompense for a total reconfiguration of land that used to be an orchard or a residential lot, or that might have been used for any number of badly needed public resources? Complicity in these arrangements of art and real estate and collusion in the new language of the public, its culture and its space, must be weighed against these apparently good opportunities to do the often precarious work of design or art-making. And so the question might be: Are critical practices able to intervene–and survive–in a landscape of patronage that is necessarily linked to private development? How might this work escalate its delinking? Beyond refusing requests for qualifications to create new cultural assets, are there meaningful ways of operating on the very policy that secures public art as that which authorizes the private development of public space? Can such work insist on definitions of the public that are incommensurable with the economy–that to which all must belong?
Cliff Garten, Suturis, 2019. Commissioned by the real estate developer Jay Paul Company and intended to “provide a link between the technology campus and the city of Sunnyvale.”
Gabrielle Printz is a co-founder of feminist architecture collaborative (f-architecture) and a Ph.D. student in architecture history and theory at Yale, where she studies the relationships between architecture, labor, and non/citizenship in the context of global capitalism.
David Middlebrook, Untitled, 1998, https://locate.publicartarchive.org/art/Untitled_301?ib=ext.
Dan Snyder, Untitled, 1992, https://locate.publicartarchive.org/art/Untitled_304?ib=ext.
Marlo Bartels, Untitled Obelisks, 2001, https://locate.publicartarchive.org/art/Untitled-Obelisks?ib=ext.
Per the city’s 2020 Public Art Master Plan: “The Art in Private Development program (AIPD) designates 1% of private development project funds to support artwork in the community. Developers can choose to incorporate art into their projects or contribute an in-lieu fee to the Public Art Fund to support City-managed art projects. As of February 2020, the AIPD program has completed 70 projects, with 84 separate artworks commissioned by private parties. The in-lieu fee option is available and to date has generated nearly $500,000 for City managed public art projects,” http://qcode.us/codes/sunnyvale/?view=desktop&topic=19-4-19_52-19_52_030. In 2020, the city amended the 2012 ordinance to increase this provision to two percent, http://qcode.us/codes/sunnyvale/revisions/3167-20.pdf.
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, “Percent for Art,” Policy Brief (NASAA: Washington, DC, 2021), 1, https://nasaa-arts.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/NASAAPercentforArtPolicyBrief.pdf.
See the elaboration on the stakeholder in The A&E System: Public Works and Private Interest in Architectural and Engineering Services, 2000–2020 (New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, 2020), 170-220, https://power.buellcenter.columbia.edu/initiatives/ae-system.
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, 6.
“[Design’s] immediate aim is to depict the form of the object to be built, so as to ensure its future use value.” Sergio Ferro, “Dessin/Chantier (1979),” in Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff, and Nicholas Beech, eds., Industries of Architecture, trans. Ricardo Agarez and Silke Kapp (New York: Routledge, 2016), 106–16.
Cliff Garten, Suturis, 2019, https://locate.publicartarchive.org/art/Suturis.