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Project Grade 12 Art & Music

Faircastle Reclamation Plant Fence Screen: A Public Art Proposal

Grade 12 teams answer a fictional city's call for a perforated metal fence artwork at a wastewater plant, with site study, test tiles, a budget, and a panel pitch.

Objectives

  1. Students will represent the stages of wastewater treatment, including its microbial processes, accurately in a large-scale public artwork.
  2. Students will compose a design that reads as large forms at road distance and as detail at trail distance.
  3. Students will meet fabrication constraints on hole size, open area, color, and budget using calculations shown in a budget table.
  4. Students will write an artist statement and present a proposal to a selection panel.

Vocabulary

Activated sludge
Activated sludge is a living brown mixture of helpful bacteria and other microbes that wastewater plants grow on purpose. The microbes clean the water by eating the waste in it.

Also: perforated metal, open area, halftone, elevation drawing, test tile, artist statement, anaerobic digestion

Teacher overview

Many cities set aside part of the budget for public buildings and infrastructure to pay for public art, and utility sites such as treatment plants are among the places where that art appears. At a plant beside a road or trail, an artwork can screen equipment and also tell the public what happens behind the fence. In this project teams respond to a call for proposals from the fictional city of Faircastle for a perforated aluminum screen along the fence of its water reclamation plant. The driving question is: how can a 240-foot screen, made only of holes in metal, show the path water takes through the plant clearly enough to satisfy the plant's operators while working as art for drivers and walkers? The final deliverable is a proposal packet and a five-minute pitch to a selection panel. A misconception worth naming at the start is that the image on a perforated screen is printed or painted on; it is made entirely by varying hole size and spacing, like a halftone in a newspaper photograph, so every tone in the design has to be translated into holes, and each hole has a fabrication cost. A second misconception, on the science side, is that treatment is mainly filtering or adding chemicals; at a plant like this one, much of the cleaning is done by microorganisms.

Faircastle Reclamation Plant Fence Screen: A Public Art Proposal — Grade 12 Art & Music
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Project Brief

Driving question. How can a screen made only of holes in metal show the path water takes through the Faircastle Water Reclamation Plant, reading clearly from a moving car and rewarding a walker who stops to look?

Client. The fictional Faircastle Arts Commission, working with the city's utility department. Plant staff will review every proposal for accuracy before the selection panel meets.

Site. In our scenario, the plant's north fence runs 240 feet along Ferrant Road. The Ferrant River trail runs between the road and the fence. Drivers pass at about 35 miles per hour, 30 to 60 feet from the fence. Walkers and cyclists on the trail pass 5 to 15 feet from it. Because the fence faces north, the sun is behind the screen for much of the day. The metal face that viewers see is in shade, and the holes show as points of light.

What happens inside the plant. The screen must show these stages in order from the west end of the screen to the east end, so that a driver heading east passes them in sequence:

  1. Screening: bar screens at the headworks catch rags, plastics, and debris, and grit settles out.
  2. Primary settling: in large tanks, heavy solids sink and grease floats to the top to be skimmed off.
  3. Aeration: blowers bubble air through long basins, and bacteria and other microorganisms eat the dissolved organic matter in the water. The microbes clump together into small masses called flocs. This is the activated sludge process.
  4. Secondary settling: the flocs settle out in round clarifiers. Part of the settled sludge is pumped back to the aeration basins to keep the microbe population steady.
  5. Disinfection: ultraviolet light inactivates the remaining disease-causing organisms.
  6. Discharge: the treated water flows into the Ferrant River.

Settled solids from stages 2 and 4 go to digesters, where different microbes break them down without oxygen and release biogas, which the plant burns to heat the digesters. Teams may show the digesters as a side story in the design.

Fabrication constraints (fictional city rules and fabricator pricing).

  • The screen is 60 aluminum panels, each 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall. Each panel is 32 square feet, or 4,608 square inches.
  • The fabricator punches round holes in three sizes only. Hole areas: 1/4-inch hole, 0.049 square inches; 1/2-inch hole, 0.196 square inches; 1-inch hole, 0.785 square inches.
  • Every panel must be at least 20 percent open, so wind can pass through, and no more than 45 percent open, so the tanks behind it stay screened.
  • Each panel is powder-coated in one color. The whole screen may use no more than two colors. Gases from the headworks, including hydrogen sulfide, corrode many metals, so the city requires an industrial-grade coating, which is included in the panel price.
  • No text on the panels except a small title plaque, and no recognizable faces.

Budget (fictional). The fabrication and installation budget is $150,000. The design fee is paid separately and is not part of this budget. Installation of the whole screen costs $21,000. Each panel costs $850 for metal, cutting, and coating, plus $0.05 for every hole punched.

Deliverables. Each team submits a proposal packet to the selection panel containing: a site analysis sheet; three concept strips; a 12-by-12-inch full-size test tile with viewing notes; a full elevation of all 60 panels at 1/8 inch = 1 foot, with hole-size zones and colors marked; a detail of three adjacent panels at 1/2 inch = 1 foot; a budget table; and an artist statement of 250 to 400 words. The team then gives a five-minute pitch, followed by three minutes of questions.

Milestones

  1. Session 1, process and constraints. Teams read the brief and draw a process strip: six small labeled sketches, one per stage, in order, each with a one-sentence caption stating what happens to the water. The teacher checks each strip against the brief before teams continue. Output: a checked process strip and a written list of every constraint in the brief.
  2. Session 2, site study and concepts. Teams complete a site analysis sheet noting the two viewing distances, the speed of passing cars, the direction of the sun, and what is visible behind the fence. Each team member then draws one concept strip at 1/8 inch = 1 foot, which makes the full screen 30 inches long and 1 inch tall. Output: the site sheet and three concept strips, with one chosen for development and a sentence explaining the choice.
  3. Session 3, test tile. Teams make a full-size 12-by-12-inch tile of the most detailed part of their chosen concept, drawing the holes as white circles on black cardstock with the circle template or printing them from a vector file. They view it from 5 feet and from about 40 feet down a hallway and record what reads at each distance. They also count the holes on the tile and calculate its open area as a percent of the tile's 144 square inches. Output: the tile, viewing notes, and the open-area calculation.
  4. Session 4, developed design. Teams draw the full elevation of all 60 panels at 1/8 inch = 1 foot, marking which hole size is used in each zone and which of the two colors each panel receives. They also draw a detail of three adjacent panels at 1/2 inch = 1 foot, marking where each hole size and density falls. The holes are too small to draw at this scale; the test tile already shows them at full size. Output: the full elevation and the three-panel detail.
  5. Session 5, budget and statement. Teams sort the 60 panels into panel types that share a hole pattern. For each type they estimate the holes per panel from the open area and hole sizes, compute the open area as a percent of 4,608 square inches, and compute the cost per panel. For example, a panel that is 30 percent open using only 1/2-inch holes needs about 1,382 square inches of holes, which is about 7,050 holes and about $353 in punching. Teams total the fabrication cost, add installation, and confirm the total is at or under $150,000, revising the design if it is not. Each team member drafts part of the artist statement, and the team edits it into one text of 250 to 400 words. Output: the completed budget table and the artist statement.
  6. Session 6, pitch. Teams present to the selection panel, which may be the teacher, invited plant staff or a local arts representative, and classmates acting as panelists. Each pitch runs five minutes, followed by three minutes of questions. Panelists score each proposal with the rubric. Output: the delivered pitch and the complete proposal packet.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Rubric
Criterion 4 Exemplary 3 Proficient 2 Developing 1 Beginning
Composition at two viewing distances Large shapes read clearly from the road as a sequence across the full 240 feet, and hole-size detail rewards a walker on the trail; the test tile notes show how both distances were checked The design reads at both distances, with a clear large-scale rhythm and some close-up detail, though one distance is noticeably stronger The design works at only one distance: large forms are lost from the road, or there is no detail worth stopping for The design is a uniform pattern or a small image that does not read at either distance
Accuracy of the treatment process Every stage from screening to discharge appears in the correct order, the microbial work in aeration is shown clearly, and plant staff would approve the imagery All stages appear in the correct order, with one simplification that does not mislead One stage is missing or out of order, or the aeration and settling stages are shown too vaguely to tell apart The imagery is general water imagery with no recognizable treatment sequence
Fit to fabrication constraints and budget Every panel is between 20 and 45 percent open, only the three hole sizes and two colors are used, and the budget table totals at or under $150,000 with calculations shown for every panel type All constraints are met, with small arithmetic errors that do not change whether the design fits One constraint is missed, such as a panel over 45 percent open or a total over budget Several constraints are ignored, or the budget table is missing
Artist statement and pitch The statement explains how each stretch of the screen represents the process and why the choices suit the site, and the team answers questions with specific references to its drawings The statement and pitch explain the concept and the process clearly, with limited discussion of site-driven choices The statement describes the imagery but not how it relates to the process or the site, and answers to questions are general The statement is missing or far outside the word range, or the pitch does not explain the work

Differentiation

Support

Provide a budget template with the three hole areas, the panel area, and the per-hole and per-panel prices already entered, so teams fill in only their panel types and open-area targets. Allow teams to design with two hole sizes instead of three. Give each team a pre-drawn elevation strip with the 60 panel divisions already marked, and pair the process strip in Session 1 with a labeled plant diagram the teacher draws on the board.

Extension

Ask teams to specify their hole patterns as grids instead of estimates. A hole of area a on a square grid with spacing s gives an open fraction of a divided by s squared, so teams can solve for the spacing that produces a target open area for each hole size and label each zone of the three-panel detail with that spacing. Teams may also photograph their test tile taped to a window at three times of day and add a short lighting study to the packet explaining how the screen will look in the morning, at midday, and at dusk.

ELL supports

Pre-teach open area, panel, elevation, and artist statement with a labeled photograph or sketch of a perforated metal screen. Provide a bilingual glossary of the six treatment stages with a small icon for each. Offer sentence frames for the artist statement, such as "The first panels show ___ because ___," and allow team members to present the part of the pitch that matches their drawings.

Extensions

Teams can write a one-page maintenance plan for the screen, covering cleaning, graffiti removal, and inspection of the coating near the headworks, and explain how the design choices reduce maintenance. A second option is to design the small title plaque, including its typeface, size, and placement, so that it identifies the artwork and the plant without competing with the screen.