Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Worth the wait’: Public art piece ‘Stepwell,’ last of major Riverfront Park redevelopment bond projects, to open Saturday

J. Meejin Yoon, Spokane Arts and the city’s Parks Department have been waiting a long time to unveil the remade Riverfront Park’s signature art piece.

It’s been five years since the Park Board gave their approval to the internationally renowned architect, designer and educator’s work, “Stepwell.” In the intervening years, tweaks were made to the design to make the feature, inspired by similar structures in western India, more accessible to those with disabilities. A global pandemic also limited the availability of Alaskan yellow cedar, the timber that has been laminated to build the 9-foot-tall structure on a meadow overlooking the upper Spokane Falls.

“We just thought it was worth the wait for the original materials specified, because of its tie with the place, with the region and with the history,” Yoon, cofounder of the firm Höweler+Yoon and the dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, said in an interview last week.

That wait will come to an end Saturday, as “Stepwell” opens to the public at a gathering beginning at 11 a.m. The public art piece, selected from four original sketches the artist submitted in late 2017, was designed and built using roughly a half million dollars of the original $64 million in taxpayer bonds approved for the park’s redevelopment. City law requires publicly funded construction projects to set aside 1% of the total cost for public art.

The nonprofit Spokane Arts worked with Yoon on the design and coordinating the piece’s construction, just northeast of the Providence Playscape playground on Havermale Island.

“It’s just a whole sensory experience to really move through it that I don’t think people would get in a photograph,” said Melissa Huggins, executive director of Spokane Arts. “We encourage people to come down and see it.”

Spokane Arts and the Spokane chapter of the American Institute of Architects also are organizing a Q&A with Yoon at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture on Friday. A social hour with a no-host bar will begin at 4 p.m., with a talk in the auditorium at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, but the MAC encourages those interested to register before the envet at tinyurl.com/3jccxhjr.

A joint commission of Spokane Arts members and the Spokane Parks & Recreation Department reviewed Yoon’s initial designs and selected “Stepwell,” a piece intended to provide expansive views of the natural formations in the park as well as a quiet, contemplative space to read, eat a meal outside or rest in the middle of the 100-acre park.

Garret Daggett, a member of the panel that selected “Stepwell,” said he saw significant potential in the design.

“I remember making the statement in the final meeting that this could be seen as Spokane’s version of the Bean, in Chicago,” Daggett said, using the common name of the sculpture “Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor that has sat in Millennium Park in the city’s downtown since 2006 and draws visitors from across the globe. “This could be our signature piece by a world-renowned artist.”

The structure will open just before the running of Bloomsday and caps a significant time in the history of the city’s park system, said Garrett Jones, director of Spokane Parks & Recreation.

“I was pushing pretty hard that we need to close the chapter on Riverfront Park,” Jones said, noting that some money from the 2014 taxpayer-approved bond will be used once the south suspension bridge is reopened to update the adjacent parking lot with more spots for those with disabilities to visit both “Stepwell” and the inclusive playground nearby. “Now we need to start focusing our attention on neighborhood and community parks.”

Yoon thanked the city of Spokane and Spokane Arts for remaining patient during the construction, which occurred on-site as workers assembled 68 pieces of wood to make up the structure.

“When you do public art, the moment that is the most exciting is when you see people interact with public art,” Yoon said. “Until then, it’s very abstract, and you can only guess how people will use it.”

Yoon said it was important that the piece was made from wood, a sustainable building product, in keeping with the environmental theme of Expo ‘74.

It’s been coated with a stain that will protect the structure from vandalism, said Jones, and there’s on-site lighting to keep the piece visible at all hours of the day. In the weeks after it opens there will be additional park ranger emphasis on protecting the structure in an effort to encourage “positive uses” of the space, he said, which is right next to the Bill Fern Conservation Area, a natural area that was the former site of a YMCA building.

“The weather’s getting better,” Jones said. “We’re getting more positive eyes, and attention too, on the Bill Fern Conservation Area. That’s an important piece.”

Yoon said she also hopes “Stepwell” will feel like an extension of the park itself, not just fading into the natural background but also sharing billing with the other public art pieces in Riverfront, including Sarah Thompson Moore’s “The Seeking Place” that opened in October, Sister Paula Mary Turnbull’s “Garbage Goat,” Ken Spiering’s giant Radio Flyer wagon sculpture “The Childhood Express” and David Govedare’s “The Joy of Running Together” Bloomsday runner statues along Post Street and Spokane Falls Boulevard.

“Timber stepwell was imagined as another element of the larger constellation of sculptures, and inhabitable sculptures,” Yoon said.

In the years since the “Stepwell” project began, Yoon has received multiple awards for an installation on the University of Virginia’s campus that is a monument to the enslaved labor that built the institution. The 80-foot structure is built in the shape of a broken ring, invoking the broken chains of slaves who were involved in the construction, and features a gathering place in its center. Names of those who are known to have participated in the construction are carved into the granite structure that was dedicated April 11, 2020.

Yoon said it was the community’s commitment to the history of Expo ‘74, and its environmental ambitions, that kept “Stepwell” on the right track.

“I think it’s that that kept the project moving forward,” she said.