Right after my coffee talk with Leigh Saturday afternoon, I walked over to the park in front of Palo Alto City Hall to compose the post of the photos I had taken that day.

I struck up a conversation with a sculptor named Sam Yates who was busy constructing a public art installation in the park. The Palo Alto weekly describes Sam's prior claim to fame:

The Sacramento native has some experience with world records, having created the Guinness-endorsed world's largest filing cabinet in 2000. For that project, known as "Minuet in MG," Yates shredded an MG sports car, flattened and measured all the pieces, and then placed them, from heaviest to smallest, inside the drawers of a 65 foot-tall filing cabinet.

What Sam is constructing in the park is a cube-shaped solar garage/office called The Color of Palo Alto Project (site not live yet) that will appear to visitors to have landed and raised its four sidewall solar panels. The panels open to reveal a transparent-walled room about 10x10 feet sqaure. Inside is a desk on a desk and a red scooter. Starting in January, Sam will systematically ride the electronics laden scooter across all of the city's GIS-mapped parcel locations and photograph them. Each photo will be stamped with GPS coordinates and a custom software application will average all the colors in the image into a single color. Sam thinks he'll end up with 20,000 photos. All of those will go onto an interactive map and then be averaged again to arrive at one ultimate signature color for the City of Palo Alto. The color will be offered as a brand element of the City. People will be able to buy the city color as a custom mix of housepaint. Sam will also sell poster collages of the photos and hang them as a giant mural on the facade of City Hall.

Until the site is up, you can read an article at the Palo Alto Weekly.

- mike lee - washington, dc