Client: City of Eugene

Overview

SubSupra brings the undulating depth and shape of the Willamette River’s underwater terrain to shore where it transforms into a light filled, dramatic and iconic gathering space at the river’s edge. Visitors become immersed within a dynamic, floating, and undulating overhead experience that also pulls dynamic reflections of the beautiful patterns and flows, colors and life force of the Willamette within the canopy for all to share. The sculptural work is more than 60 ft long, 15 ft high and 10 ft wide, composed of painted stainless steel and mirror polished stainless steel, enhanced with LED lighting at night.

Goals

SubSupra is located within Eugene Downtown Riverfront Park, an ambitious transformation of a post-industrial riverfront site into a major downtown attraction that reconnects the city with the Willamette River. An integrated, iconically-scaled sculptural gathering space was seen as an extremely important element of this transformative new urban park by the community and the City, as a symbolic gateway to the riverfront and as a visible expression of Eugene's ongoing commitment to contemporary art and culture.

Process

We worked with the City, the landscape architect, and a wide range of specialty consultants on the overall park conceptual design including establishing the goals for the public artwork. This multi-year process also included a robust community and stakeholder engagement effort to ensure that resident needs and desires were met and that they were excited by the design. The creation of the artwork: SubSupra was a highly integrated process as well, where we collaborated closely with the landscape architecture team, structural engineers, lighting consultants and specialty fabricators to seamlessly integrate the work into the river outlook of the park where it can be seen from multiple different viewpoints and experiences.

Additional Information

SubSupra has become a highly regarded and well visited landmark for the Eugene Riverfront. The artwork's ability to bring the city to the water and the water to the city achieved one of the most important goals of the overall project.