From the city’s desire to grow and develop in a thoughtful way, came the City of Santee’s “River View Office Park Master Plan.” This plan details the continuation of development over the next ten years, and the “Enhanced Crossing” (which we refer to as Santee Town Center) portion of the plan refers to a major road intersection that connects the existing south side of the city to the burgeoning new north side.
The city envisioned a very colorful and artistic representation of direction through ribbons leading you from one side of the crosswalk to the next. To bring that idea to life, T. B. Penick’s Artist, Amanda Klemaske, created a flower-shaped LithoMosiac with various blue Mosaic tiles to be placed within the middle of the intersection. The ribbons along the crosswalk were designed with various blue and yellow glass materials. The ribbons lie within the 10-feet-wide crosswalks of the 4-street intersection.
The Artist worked closely with the Landscape Architect from Estrada Land Planning, Joe Esposito to complete the design that met the City of Santee’s design intent. T.B. Penick prides itself on getting to know a project from design to development to make sure that we identify any potential issues that might arise and that there is a smooth transition from design to installation. In addition to the open lines of communication and frequent meetings, we provided physical samples and mock-ups so that everyone could see, touch and visualize what the final project would look like.
By meeting early on with the City of Santee, the Architect, and Artist, we were able to identify any issues that came up from the design performance requirements, samples and field review. We were able to incorporate these changes in the materials and drawing to maintain a smooth transition to installation. In the end, the successful installation was just confirmation of all of the team’s collaboration.
One of the challenges we had to overcome within this project was changing our means and methods to be able to install a LithoMosaic of this magnitude in an MTS right away. To overcome this, we developed an innovative tool that could lift and install each large piece of the Mosaic flower petals precisely. This tool was necessary because each LithoMosaic piece was comprised of 8 petals, each of which measured 15’ x 15’.
We were thrilled to be a part of this artistic and challenging project and are proud of the innovation, creation and collaboration by all participants, which contributed to its success!