Synopsis: Winter, Season of Light was a temporary, site specific, virtual landscape that stretched 700 feet long and 100 feet high in downtown Tacoma. The project combined the singularity of art with the social pragmatism of architecture; fields of light merged among and reflected upon the boundaries of architecture and water. It was designed to stimulate awareness of architectural heritage by redefining the edges of an abandoned neighborhood and projecting large interventions of absolute light.
I have a familiar and contemplative appreciation for ruins: they are a faded, visual left over of a remote time, positive edges cast into void, reversed negative shapes. They are the hint and visual continuity that bridge our memory from the time before to the time after, islands of silence. There are ruins in contemporary Tacoma, a product of a demolition of a downtown from the 20th century. Saved from the demolition of the 1300 block are two buildings – the Luzon and Baker buildings – standing respectively on the north and south side of the two-city block. Between them a procession of buttress walls have remained as evidence of a past reduced to ruins.
With the support of an active committee and hundreds of people volunteering both planning and construction, I designed and built a virtual landscape that stretched 700 feet long and 100 feet high, composed of panels, light, and water to reveal the absent life and the physical void left behind after the demolition. Light – first red, then for a short time blue – was projected in front of the panels between the buttresses and behind the windows of the buildings.
Winter, Season of Light, opened on December 31st 1999, to celebrate the Millennium. The Mayor of Tacoma proclaimed January Season Of Light Month in recognition of the social and cultural success for Puget Sound's communities. The exhibition closed on January 16th 2000 as a result of gale force winds that caused an unexpected demolition.