Icing on the cake

Recently most of the construction fences around the ELCO Yards project — which is located immediately adjacent to 1180 Main St. — have been removed, allowing me to clearly see all sides of three of the project’s four office buildings. Walking all around them not only gives me a fresh perspective on buildings I’ve been watching since their beginnings, it provides clear looks at the public art accompanying those buildings.

The two buildings standing side by side between Main Street and the Caltrain tracks are sisters in that they were both built atop a common two-level parking garage. From their overall appearances, though, you’d never pair them up. The northernmost of the two is curvaceous and nearly all mirrored glass. As for its sister, that one building is designed to look like two separate but connected buildings, with the southern portion being a rectangular box parallel to the tracks clad in alternating layers of glass and light gray metal siding. In contrast, the northern portion stands perpendicular to the tracks and looks a bit like an enormous barn made from dark glass shaded by closely spaced horizontal strips of black metal below an all-black metal upper structure and roof. Walk along the path behind these dissimilar sisters, though, and you’ll see they have at least one thing in common: both sport large murals clearly visible from passing trains.

The similarly sized murals have both been painted by Kelly Ording. On the southernmost building the mural depicts herons in front of a background comprised largely of blue and gray stripes topped by rolling hills and an orange sun. The other building’s mural is similar, but uses different colors — the stripes are pink and shades of purple — and has different birds (sandpipers, perhaps). Both are quite attractive and both are well worth a visit.

These buildings also share what is my personal favorite piece of public art in the ELCO Yards project so far: the large metal red “Skate” sign that once was mounted above the Redwood Roller Rink’s entry doors. That rink, you may recall, was torn down to make way for these two buildings — it was located roughly where the northern building now stands — making this piece of art a memento of what once was. Today, the sign stands atop a concrete base at the end of the drive separating the buildings and connecting Main Street to the parking garage. The sign’s original, very tired face has been preserved and is visible from both the walkway behind the buildings and from passing trains. As for the sign’s original backside — which now faces Main Street — it has been made new and spells “skate” outlined in neon (or LED) tubes using the original font.

Finally, over on Lathrop Street, the building standing at the corner of El Camino Real and Cedar Street (which one day may house a roller rink on its ground floor) has, on its Lathrop Street side, its own pieces of public art. That side of the building contains the entrance to its office space, adjacent to which are four free-standing pillars, each painted so as to remind me of what a child might create from variously colored Lego bricks. And in front of those, out by Lathrop Street, is a concrete-and-wood bench adorned with flat cloud-shaped cutouts in a variety of pastel colors.

The sheer variety of art within ELCO Yards so far is fascinating: it can be abstract (like the pillars), functional (like the bench), reminiscent (the Skate sign) and representational (the two bird murals). And yet, this may not be all — the fourth building is not quite done and two residential buildings are still to come. Hopefully this lovely new outdoor gallery has even more pops of art to delight us.