Welcome Terrace East & West

This project is part of The Commons at Headlands Center of the Arts. The public opening is Sunday, September 17, 2017.

Once neatly paved and flat, the paved driveways in front of the Barracks buildings have decayed to a state of semi-function.  We propose drawing out their inherent beauty by repairing them and bringing them up to contemporary standards of accessibility. Our aim is to illuminate repair as a moment in the history of the walkways and decay as part of the history of Fort Barry.

We based our approach on Kintsugi – the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. From the Japanese the term roughly translates to mean golden joinery or golden repair.  At Headlands, we will treat the driveways as part of the history of the Fort Barry.

We will work in the manner of archaeologists by documenting each pathway, collecting and organizing the fractured and misaligned fragments of concrete, meticulously reassembling them to form a flat surface, then shaping and filling the cracks between them with a colored terrazzo mortar.