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"Working" at the Foundry Garage

Foundry Place Parking Garage: Design Narrative

Site History

The site for the Foundry Place parking garage has a long and varied past as an industrial site and as a conduit for industry as mentioned in the project RFP. The Sanborn Maps from the 1880’s and into the early 1900’s, available through the Dartmouth Library archive, show the Union Depot Railroad Station and the numerous rail lines abutting the project and the evolving footprint of Portsmouth Machine Company on the site as well as nearby Portsmouth Shoe factory.

The City of Portsmouth has also had numerous foundries including such as the Franklin Iron Foundry, the Portsmouth Iron Company, Portsmouth Steam Factory, Gerrish Brass Foundry, and a foundry and forge directly associated with the Portsmouth Machine Company. The Portsmouth Machine Company made machines for the textile industry, pipes, boilers, and wheel castings.

The local foundries supplied the raw metal that went on to serve related industries, forges, and makers of tools. In fact, in the resource entitled ‘Instruments of Change: NH Hand Tools and Their Makers 1800-1900’, Portsmouth is shown to have had numerous hand tool makers. Those makers of tools included companies and blacksmiths such as: Bartlett and Young, Richard Cotter, the Foss Company, Marshall and Trickey, James Raitt, George Trafton, Riggs, and Shillaber of 1768. Those hand tools likely included a varied of tools with edges such as: knives, hoes, shovels, mattocks, and hammers for different uses.

Sculptural Proposal: Design Elements

My proposal acknowledges the varied textile and industrial histories on and abutting this site with a focus on the human element as the driving force of the technological development experienced by those industries. What these industries have in common is the workers---the people that created the change, the makers of tools, the builders of factories and the machines in the factories.

Another element held in common is the quintessential tool shared by all the early industries and many building practices to this day---the hammer.  If one looks at a hammer, absent the handle, a human figure can be seen in the abstract. In fact, in conceptualizing my approach to this project, the more I look at hammers without handles the easier it is to see a figure.  And once I started crafting clay hammer figures I clearly saw Cycladic figures from antiquity in my clay models. The complete array of design elements of this sculptural environment consists of the following:

• Hammer-head figures: represent workers and human effort. They are scaled at a monumental size of 1.5x that of life-size, so the hammers will be approximately 9’ tall. The hammer is also the work tool that has evolved with humans through millennia.
• Wheel-Cast: a typical form used to transfer power from steam engines of the textile industries. And a product of the Portsmouth Machine Company. A 6’ diameter metal wheel is constructed for this proposal to emphasize technological history, physical mass, and human effort.
• Railroad Tracks: the tracks in this sculpture represent the history of the site and the abutting properties. As sculpture the tracks animate the ground plane and contain and direct the motion of the hammer-head figures and the 6’ steel wheel.

 

Concept A: ‘Working’

Site Selection:

The site selected is the 34’ diameter space within the vehicular turning circle on the southwest corner of the parking garage.   

Conceptual Narrative

This sculptural environment articulates the aforementioned site history and conveys the idea of people in the act of working. The product of that work is represented by the cast wheel, but the hammer heads and rails are also products of work and the tools to produce work. Work is a basic tenet of the human experience. Doing work is part of our survival skills. It is a necessary and diverse experience. The history of work during the industrial age is fraught with dangerous experiences in the work place. Child labor and other abuses of labor were common in the textile industry and working around machinery during this era was dirty, loud, and stressful. Work and making things has always been a valued and rewarding human experience, but the occupational hazards associated with these industries was real.  

The contradictions of the work experience were intense for many workers during the industrial. People made new and inventive products and devices and that work both defined an individual’s identity and created hazards to their health. Railroads did create physical access to new territories and gainful employment, but trains got derailed and workers died building tracks. Children helped support an impoverished family, but sacrificed their childhood and education in the process. 

This sculptural project endeavors to expose the dualities of the work experience---the achievement and the struggle.

In my mind’s eye the hammer is an iconic form representing the very act of building. The hammer was at one time the state-of-the-art tool for creating all manner of items. It may not be cutting edge in the 21st century, but it has evolved and remains a vital tool for the act building and creating. And when a hammer is detached from a handle it has an undeniable figurative form, I see humans in hammer-heads. These figures then become the workers in this evocative sculpture.

In this sculpture, a team of hammer-head workers goes to work---they lean in to push technological progress forward. The technological advancement is represented by the cast wheel of the age of the steam engine. This is a figurative not a literal metaphor. Hammers did not make cast wheels, but one tool helped other tools push progress forward. Cast wheels did roll on railroad tracks, but were not pushed by hammers. And the rail road was omnipresent, bringing in raw materials and moving all manner of supplies to and from destinations.

These hammer-head figures are working together, but they are struggling to do so. Work is hard. Work is dangerous. The hammer-heads work in unison here, in an assembly line-like arrangement, together they exert energy, cooperate, and empathize with each other. They share the work environment whether it be the Portsmouth Machine Company, the rail road, the near-by shoe factory or any of the local tool making places, forges or foundries.

How long can the hammer-figure struggle with the effort of working the wheel? Why a wheel? Where is the wheel going?

The assembly line is broken: one hammer is procumbent and belly -up, have they fallen or are they resting?

All the while a hammer-figure looks on. Is it a boss, an owner, or another worker at the ready to lend a hand up or a shoulder to the effort? Is there sympathy here?

The act of using hammer-heads as human figures forces the observer to examine the role of hammers in the act of work on the human scale. When one wonders why a hammer is gesturing like a human, questions can then be asked about the local history of wheel-casting, textiles and shoes, rails, tools, factories, forges and foundries, the experience of human labor, and the evolution of work technologies.

 

C. ‘Hammer-heads in Thought’:  Two hammer-head figures and a hammer handle

• This design can be located on the portion of sidewalk at the southwest corner of the parking garage were the sidewalk extends to 14’ off the building.
• This design extends and compliments the narrative of the central work them from Concept ‘A’.
• This concept consists of two 9’ tall hammer figures and a 20’ long wooden hammer. Since the handle is designed to be a bench for pedestrians and the hammer-figures stand like a light post, it is the perfect

 

The making of “Working”: Terrence Parker, a PechaKucha talk

 

"Hammer-Heads" make Portsmouth public art history

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