Pat Patterson’s Giant Steps, 1978–80, nestles in a bowl-shaped hillside at the Norton residence in La Honda, 40 or 50 miles south of San Francisco. Just below the crest of a mountain ridge between the San Francisco Bay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, the architectural sculpture faces south, toward a panoramic view of the ocean. The site is breathtaking, and continuously in motion—winds at the top of the ridge sometimes reach a velocity of a hundred miles an hour. For an encore to spectacular sunsets, the valley below fills with cotton-candy puffs of fog. With the natural setting itself so completely overwhelming, it is rather an audacious act for an artist to place a sculpture here.
Since Patterson worked on the patrons’ nearby house, he had the time to become intimately familiar with the terrain. Decisions regarding the location, orientation, configuration, and materials of Giant Steps were made in response to the landscape. Each of four 40-foot-wide, 5-foot-high steps is flanked by a 9-foot-high cast-concrete column, which Patterson calls a gnomon—in a sundial, the object that casts a shadow. The positions of the steps were determined in relation to shadows cast by the gnomons on the summer and winter solstices and on the spring and fall equinoxes. The rock for the stepped construction was dug from a quarry on a lower ridge across the valley, so the sculpture and its source work reciprocally as positive and negative modes of one another. And each of the steps has a facade of ceramic tile. Two are white and two black, the extremes of all color and no color; the tiles reflect the setting sun’s light into elusive modulations which dissolve the physicality of the structure. As a result, Giant Steps simultaneously merges with and augments the landscape’s spectacular presence at twilight, modestly receding into the shadows even as it reverberates with the myriad facets of the sun’s sinking brilliance.
In addition to its visual sensuality and interrelatedness to the environment, Giant Steps addresses issues that are both current and timeless, such as the relationship between sculpture and architecture, and the question of metaphor. Some ancient monuments, like Stonehenge, raise questions regarding their status—are they architecture or sculpture? Must architecture fulfill the function of shelter or protection? Can sculpture be functional? The function of Patterson’s piece (as we surmise that of Stonehenge to be) is to attune the viewer to the rhythms of the days and the seasons, allowing us to perceive our movement through time and space, or the process of being. This effect is in marked contrast to that of the urban environment of the 20th century.
The artist conceives of his work as both two-and three-dimensional, the shadows cast by its concrete columns creating a drawing executed by the sun. In fact, the shadows recorded by Patterson at the two solstices and equinoxes became his “sketch” for the sculpture. As Robert Morris has pointed out (in Artforum, October 1975, pp. 35–49), the experiences of two-dimensional form and three-dimensional space activate different modes of experience—the two-dimensional invoking a sense of linear logic and control, while the encounter with space demands a more intuitive response and a surrender of control. At particular moments of time, both these modes can be experienced at once in Patterson’s work.
In the context of Northern California Giant Steps can be seen as an urban ruin, the cast concrete signifying 20th-century technology and the ceramic tile a very ancient technology that has now been industrialized. The construction of the architectural sculpture in the landscape alludes to the interface of culture and nature; the architectural promise of shelter is suggested but subverted, as the piece in fact has no enclosure, but stands open and exposed to the elements. The cumulative effect of Giant Steps, however, is not a dualistic opposition of man to nature, or sculpture to landscape, but a symbiotic relationship in which each enhances the other, enabling us to perceive both more acutely.
—Melinda Wortz
