One hundred years after the Statue of Liberty left France and sailed for the United States, the second largest copper sculpture in America left Baltimore, Maryland and headed west for Portland, Oregon by rail.
Three stories tall, Portlandia is Liberty's daughter. She was created with the same painstaking and antiquated techniques, and was commissioned by the Metropolitan Arts Commission to symbolize the city as a gateway to the Orient and Pacific Rim Trade.
Portlandia arrived in Portland on August 9, 1985. After an initial stopover at the city's train station, where only the head of the statue was displayed for the view of the public, it reached an intermediary stop at the marine fabrication facility of Gunderson Inc., where sculptor/architect Raymond Kaskey of Washington, D.C. assembled the statue's nine sections for Portlandia's October 6 dedication.
After a trip up the Willamette River on a barge accompanied by a flotilla of well-wishers, Portlandia finally reached its destination. It is now ensconced above Portland's Fifth Avenue on Michael Graves' postmodern architectural milestone, the Portland Building. Graves, who gave the sculpture its name, announced it "will completely change and enhance the building," and it does.
Over the last three years, sculptor Raymond Kaskey had enlarged his original two-foot-tall maquette to nine feet in clay and plaster. Then, using a pantograph and working off the plaster model, he constructed plywood contours, or templates. Laboriously he hammered 1 ½ tons of copper sheets over the templates to create Portlandia's upper and lower torsos, legs and arms--a relatively inexpensive technique called "repousse," which Kaskey believes has not been attempted on a large scale since the Statue of Liberty.
But unlike the iron strips on the inside contours of the Statue of Liberty, which Kaskey intended to copy, the internal armature or skeleton of Portlandia is an awesome cage of two box trusses and hundreds of welded steel struts on which the skin floats, attached by six hundred copper plates. He invented this technique with the help of Yale architect Professor Ken Bloomer and a building firm. The plates secure the skin to the armature and prevent electrolysis, which occurs when steel and copper, rubbing together, create an electric charge which causes the steel to corrode.
When the costs climbed from the budgeted $198,000 (based on one percent of the cost of The Portland Building) to $500,000, and sculptor Raymond Kaskey faced financial ruin, Portland citizens and businesses rushed forward to offer their aid. They organized the "Portlandia to Portland" campaign and contributions from $10 to $10,000 flooded in.
Kaskey himself traveled a long road since winning the open international competition for a sculpture evoking Portland's agriculture, industry, and commerce. Chosen from over one hundred artists, Kaskey was invited to submit a maquette based upon the City of Portland symbol and, after two more elimination rounds, was awarded the commission.
The resulting thirty-foot-tall copper lady who kneels above the entrance to Portland's public service building has her right arm outstretched in welcome
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