Art can be anywhere — even in places you might not expect it. And anyone who’s driven on metro Phoenix freeways knows the walls and bridges are kind of turned into a canvas — with colors and designs on them. And, that’s by design.
Joseph Salazar is Arizona Department of Transportation's landscape architecture project manager. He’s been with the agency for more than 35 years, and says the next phase of what he’d like to do includes focusing more on landscaping and planting trees.
Salazar jouined The Show to talk about how big of a component the architectural design of a project is when ADOT is looking to design freeway.
Full conversation
JOSEPH SALAZAR: Oh, it's, it's pretty big now. When I had first started 35 years ago, we didn't do the design work that you currently see ... We really did nothing, we didn't even paint the structures of that, so it was a very gradual evolution from just putting paint on the walls of the bridges to developing simple patterns on the walls that, you know, adding in some landscaping.
So it, it was a process that we, went through.
MARK BRODIE: What got that process started? Like, why, why and how did you start doing this?
SALAZAR: Well, shortly after I started, I got a call from our state engineer, Dan Lance, at the time, and he called me up at my office, and he said, "Joseph, what's all this artsy stuff I hear that you want to do on the on the freeway, the bridges of the walls?" And, he says, "I want to come and meet with you."
So he came over to my office and asked, "Well, why do you want to do this stuff?" And I said, well, Dan, if you look at our upcoming regional freeway system, our freeways, our highways are no longer gonna be on the outskirts of our communities. We are gonna be going through prominent areas within the cities where people live and where they work. And we need to do a better job to mitigate the impacts that the freeways will have on the neighborhoods and the businesses.
He says you're gonna have to keep your patterns simple, preferably geometric. You gotta stay within the project schedule with within the budget. And if you don't, we just take it out. So, again, we first started just, you know, applying paint to the walls.
After that, we started developing simple patterns on the bridge, columns and on the piers. It got, you know, as we develop, we got a little bit more elaborate. So typically before design starts, you know, I do an extensive site analysis. Does a particular area, does it have any significant geological, topographical, historical or archaeological features of the area? And, and if it does, I like to incorporate that into the design patterns.
BRODIE: What is the balance between trying to have an aesthetically interesting design and making sure that it's not distracting to drivers who are, you know, cruising down the freeways at 65 or more miles per hour?
SALAZAR: Well, keeping the desired, so, you know, I, I like to see them as helping to keep the motorists' attention ... They're placed in such a way that they're not going to distract the motorists, but to give them a sense of place to let people know, OK, are they in Phoenix or are they in Tempe? Or in Mesa or Chandler or Goodyear? And so forth.
BRODIE: How do people use the the freeway designs to tell where they are? I've I've learned a little bit about this. Is it design? Is it color? Or how do people do it?
SALAZAR: It's a combination, so like just taking like the color. So when we first started, a lot of the work was just started like in the Phoenix area. So there's a color that's called tan, we call it ADOT tan, and as the system started progressing, right before we had the first Super Bowl — which was held in Tempe, that was in 1996 — but prior to that, the city of Tempe and Mesa had approached us. And they said, well, we want a different color for our portion of the freeway because we don't want the public thinking that they're still in Phoenix with the tan color. So we want our own identity. So, the agreement was with those communities was that, OK, we're gonna select one other color, which would be our second color, but both communities have to agree to it.
So I thought this reddish brown color, which complements the Tempe buttes, the Papago Park. As well as in Mesa of the red mountain ... So that's why you have that as you're leaving Phoenix for the tad killer, you go into that reddish brown on the 202 Red Mountain portion.
Well, when it came time to do the tad of Gilbert and Chandler, they said, well, we want our own identity. We don't want people to think we're a base or Tempe or Phoenix, so that a third color was developed that what is kind of a brown called koala bear.
It as as the system progressed to the southbound, the South Mountain has its own unique color, complementary the color the rock formation of the south bound, which is kind of a grayish olive color that, but we try to keep the colors to a minimum, we don't want each segment or each section to have its old color but keep it at more of a regional of that.
BRODIE: So I'm looking out the window of our studio right now at the Broadway curve construction, and they're just starting to paint on one of the bridges that I can see here. It's kind of like a brownish red color, it almost looks like it's kind of in the distance, so it's hard to see, but they kind of look like waves or maybe like spiral circles in there. Is that a specific like design for this area or is that just a general Southwestern feel that you're putting on that?
SALAZAR: Well, that, that particular design is an extension of the Sky Harbor project of that because we've expanded the Sky Harbor, you know, going south with the traffic interchange, so it's a replication of what was done by the Sky Harbor Airport, so we wanted some continuity with the two projects.
BRODIE: Do you ever hear criticism from people who say things like, why are we spending time and money putting art on freeways? Let's just build the freeways and be done with it.
SALAZAR: Oh, not, not so much that, it's more do more.
BRODIE: Really?
SALAZAR: Yes, yeah, because, the public, they've been a big supporter of ours because long before we started doing a lot of this stuff. You know, they, they wanted the freeways to look, look nice, and we initially just started doing it on the traffic side of the walls, but they said, well, we want those patterns also on the back side of the walls where our homes are.
We want it not only to look nice as we're coming back into our communities, but when we're at home, we also want to look at some nice designs and patterns on the walls, not, you know, just something blank so.
BRODIE: All right, that is Joseph Salazar, ADOT's landscape architectural project manager. Joseph, nice to talk to you. Thank you.
SALAZAR: Thank you.
