Two sketches for a fountain
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on November 8, 2015 3:05 AM
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Downtown Goldsboro's fountain on Center Street, called "Cityscape," is based on an idea the designer had for a fountain in New Bern in 2000.
And while the fountain in Goldsboro might look similar to the sketch of a fountain tucked inside New Bern's Urban Design Plan from 2000, Allison Platt, Cityscape's designer, says the two are substantially different.
The fountain for New Bern appeared as a sketch by Ms. Platt's associate, Eric Hyne, in the city's urban design plan -- and was included as a depiction of what could potentially take shape in New Bern. Ms. Platt said that was only an idea she had that Hyne sketched after she told him to include a water feature in the design plan for New Bern.
The fountain designed and constructed in downtown Goldsboro went from an idea Ms. Platt had, to being approved to be designed and built after Goldsboro received the TIGER V grant in 2013, to construction drawings with precise construction specifications, to a reality at the intersection of Walnut and Center streets.
"All the plans and all the drawings in any master plan are basically a vision," Ms. Platt said. "They're not plans in the sense that you could build from them."
Much like Ms. Platt created New Bern's 2000 master plan, she also created a master plan for downtown Goldsboro in 2007. This master plan for Goldsboro also contained a sketch showing a placeholder for where a fountain could be placed in the roundabout in which it currently sits.
She was paid for her work on New Bern's 2000 Urban Design Plan, which contained the fountain sketch, and was hired to design Cityscape for Goldsboro.
Tiffany Edmonds, administrative assistant of development services in New Bern, said records are purged every seven to 10 years, and therefore the city does not have on file how much they paid Ms. Platt for her work on the city's master plan.
To design and create specifications for Cityscape, Ms. Platt was paid $12,000 by Goldsboro, according to contract figures provided by Finance Director Kaye Scott. Building the fountain cost slightly more than $385,000 and, due to the nature of the TIGER V grant, the city paid roughly $96,250 for the fountain's construction, while the grant money covered the rest.
"Basically I showed this little circle with a little circle with blue in it. That's as much as I thought about it," Ms. Platt said, referencing the concept shown in Goldsboro's 2007 master plan. "And I said, this signifies that this is the most important place in downtown Goldsboro. And I said it could be a fountain, it could be grass and flowers, it could be sculpture, it could be anything, but this is an important place. So that's what that symbolized. And it's the same with that (in New Bern's 2000 master plan)."
Ms. Platt also said that construction drawings, such as those created for Cityscape in Goldsboro when enough funding was secured, are not based on sketches included in master plans created for cities.
"Only to the extent that there is a fountain (in the master plan)," Ms. Platt said. "And they (New Bern) never got to that stage. They said well, how much would it cost? And we didn't really know, and you have to understand that my client for this was not the city of New Bern, it was Swiss Bear, which is the downtown organization (in New Bern). And all the money that they spend for a lot of the projects that they've done, they've raised themselves. This (fountain in New Bern's master plan) probably would have been over $100,000 -- just giving a rough guess. And they really wanted to do it, they liked the idea of having a fountain there, but they didn't want to raise $100,000 (for the fountain) because they had so many more things that were going on."
Ms. Platt said the fountain shown in New Bern's 2000 Urban Design Plan was the result of asking her illustrator, Hyne, to include a water feature in that location of the plan.
"I didn't actually design the fountain that was in that (New Bern) drawing, I just said (to Hyne) put a water feature in the middle," Ms. Platt said. "That was about as much thought that went into it."
People are inclined to forget written plans but are much more likely to remember sketches included in the master plans created for cities, Ms. Platt said.
"In a way, I suppose, that's the problem, because when it came to implementation, their assumption was that it would look exactly like the sketches," she said. "But the sketches were so imprecise as to be meaningless."
The sketch of a fountain included in New Bern's 2000 Urban Design Plan, while similar in appearance to Cityscape, does have differences.
"I just had this idea, I had this picture in my mind of the idea of a granite fountain, and whether New Bern wanted it or not, it was still an idea in my mind, and I thought it was a good idea," Ms. Platt said. "This one (the New Bern sketch created by Hyne) shows the pieces (of the fountain) at an angle. As it turns out, that was not very wise structurally in order to make it stable. So it evolved, essentially, into something where it was just vertical pieces because you can support it structurally. New Bern is a very different place than Goldsboro, and this fountain is a very different fountain than the original concept."
Cityscape's concept -- a granite fountain designed to look like a city skyline -- is one that Ms. Platt has had for a while. And now, as Streetscape is complete, this idea has become a reality at the heart of Goldsboro's downtown.
"I thought about, in the abstract, before anybody could have taken it, whether it was going to be one city or another, I had an idea about a fountain that was made out of granite and had water running down it that sort of was like buildings," Ms. Platt said. "I suggested it to them (New Bern), I suggested it to some other people and most people didn't have the funds or the interest in building it."