Mosaic Labyrinth

The mosaic part of the labyrinth is finished. We completed it with a team of students (along with one staff member and one faculty member) from Saint Mary's University, this past Saturday. They made nearly 60 blocks in just under 3 hours. The pace was fast and furious, but the work that was done was amazing.

We will be adding the ground cover plants later this week or next.

Most everyone wore their SMU red shirts

The labyrinth at the beginning of the day

Dr. Tadie and some of the New Student Volunteers - mostly freshmen

This student was kept busy placing the blocks that everyone made

A group shot - there's still a few blocks to finish,
but some students needed to leave, so we shot the photo

A closer view

Professor Joe Tadie puts in the last block.

And it's finished!

Labyrinth - Day 1

Great progress was made! Today we got 63 of the 180+ stones mosaiced.

 Over the course of the day I'm guessing we had 25 or so volunteers come by and create a mosaic stone or two.

We'll be doing this again on Thursday, August 25, between 4pm & 7pm. 

Once all the stones are completed we'll be touching up the alignment in the labyrinth, filling in the areas around the stones with the dirt and laying sod. The small gaps between the stones in the pathways and the larger gaps between the stones in the switchbacks will get filled in with dirt and be seeded with grass so that the visual effect of the gaps will be minimized.

Getting the stones in place. We had to re-level the ground because the sidewalk ended up higher than we thought it would be.

We ended up placing all the stones in the actual labyrinth space and taking up the paper template. It worked better than I thought it would.

Our workstations (and the sand pile)

Buckets of recycled glass stones and buckets of river rocks

Mosaic work on the concrete paving stone

More mosaic work - a mom and her helper

Meanwhile the excavation and leveling continues

See the frog?

Some of our volunteers

Laying out the labyrinth

Working on the stones

More volunteers working

A closer look

One of the switchbacks

All but a few stones are in place

A fish

A whirlpool

Bends in the river

More bends

A turtle

Taking a look at the end of the day

Evaluating the day's work

Being contemplative

In the end, kids prefer a pile of dirt over most play equipment.

East End Rec Center Park Labyrinth

I've been commissioned to create a labyrinth in the newly recreated East End Rec Center Park.

The rec center location: the entire block between 4th & 5th and
Zumbro & St. Charles streets – building, the basketball courts,
the skateboard park, and the park.

The park as it was

The park as it will be

The work of building the labyrinth:

The first step was to select a design for the labyrinth. I decided that we should use a Classical labyrinth design instead of a Medieval or Contemporary design. I choose a Baltic Classical labyrinth which is a double spiral labyrinth. The double spiral labyrinths can be walked in multiple ways (as opposed to other forms of labyrinths where one follows the same path in and out).

The location for the future labyrinth. Note: all the old playground equipment
is being replaced with earthenworks and other interesting play adventure features.

The labyrinth will be in the southeast corner of the park. Originally the plan called for a 20' labyrinth, but I convinced everyone that it needed to be bigger in order for the pathways to be wide enough. It will be a permanent installation, but we're creating it with blocks instead of digging a footer and pouring concrete. We wanted the walking surface to be grass, not pavement.

Materials:
We will be using solid concrete blocks that will have mosaic work on the top surface. They will be set into the ground so that they can be mowed over. The mosaic will be a river with river creatures in it. We're using recycled glass and river pebbles for the river and the river banks. The river creatures are being created by local glass artists, Bernadette Mahfood and Walken Ratajcyk.

The Work Days
The mosaic work will be done over the course of 3 or 4 days by members of the community – Saturday, August 18, 9am - 3pm; Thursday, August 23, 4pm -7pm (at the Rec Center's Block Party Olympics); and Saturday, August 25, 9am - 3pm. The builds are open to everyone (but we're asking that any child under the age of 10 work with their parent or another adult/older teen).

Making the River:
The surface of the blocks measures 8" wide and 16" long. The river will be 4-6" wide (varying width as it goes along) with an inch or two of shoreline on each side. We'll draw the outlines on the blocks. I'll have a second full-sized drawing to spread out on the parking lot at the park. We'll lay out the blocks and trim any that need shaped. We will work from the spread out blocks during the mosaicing  – the blocks will be numbered so that we can keep track of where they went in the pattern. We will let the blocks set for 24 hours before the installation to make sure that the thinset mortar is set up anhd they can be handled without damaging them.

What's been done so far:
I drew the labyrinth full size (the 20' size – which is how I figured out that it needed to be a bit larger) on heavy paper (with the help of Emerald) and took it to the park last Friday. Since we were increasing the size we cut out the diagram and expanded it on the field. We pinned it in place with insulation supports (very strong thin metal rods), and once it was all in place we marked the path dividers.

After I left the Parks & Rec crew and volunteers dug out the path divider trench. 

Another Labyrinth

Today I took part of my lunch hour and helped Eileen & Tadie recreate a labyrinth for the graduate program course that Eileen teaches. It was our 4th labyrinth together. Tadie took some photos and perhaps a video of the making of it. If he sends it to me I will post it here later.
Here is the first one we did - I think it was 3 years ago. It is nearly perfect. We have the best process for painted labyrinths...

Eileen measured the space we had to work with - an 80' diameter circle (or 960").

I took an image of the Chartres cathedral labyrinth into Illustrator as a background image.

I then drew concentric circles , lining them up with the 11 circuits of the unicursal labyrinth.

I added the lines for the switch-backs and the gaps for the pathway and then grouped all the elements so that they would stay in the same relative positions, and deleted the background image.

I set the base measurement in Illustrator to points, and enlarge the grouped graphic to 960 points in diameter.

Now I could use Illustrator's measuring tools to determine the all the necessary measurements.

Since there was a 10" diameter tree in the center of the area I took 5 inches off of the radius and then took a copper rod and bent it into a circle that we slipped around the tree.

Using a 1/4" rope, we placed a tab of masking tap at intervals matching the dividers for the 11 circuits.

We then painted the straight lines and plotted where the curved lines began and ended, where the switch-backs were and where the entrance was.

Then using a athletic field painting handcart, we walked backwards, spraying the paint, using the rope as a spoke as we went round and round creating the circuits.

Once those were finished we added the center and outer lunettes, and the curved corners at the switch-backs.

We learned that the labyrinth would last through two mowings, although it would need retouched fairly soon after the second mowing. We kept it up for several months and then repainted it the next spring.

The one we painted today is a bit mis-shapen due to being on the side of a hill, but it will still work. Instead of a tree in the middle, we tied the rope to a large screwdriver and stuck it in the ground where we wanted the center of the labyrinth to be.