The family of 96-year-old Quebecois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt is not giving up the fight to save the 710-ton concrete landmark known as Québec Libre! or the Vaillancourt Fountain. The public artwork has been an iconic, if controversial, part of the landscape of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza since it was constructed in 1971.
However, last summer, San Francisco’s arts commission, which owns the work, was asked if would “deaccession” the sculpture in order to accommodate the city’s planned renovation of the plaza.
“It’s one of urban America’s truly bizarre works of public art,” John King, a former architecture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, told the New York Times last fall. “And a reminder of midcentury mistakes.”
After months of back-and-forth debate between local officials and Vaillancourt Fountain supporters, the city began dismantling it this week; the disassembly and relocation is expected to take several months and cost $4 million, reported the CBC.
Vaillancourt’s son Alexis, who is also an artist, is involved with the campaign to keep the fountain in place. Alexis and a group called Friends of the Plaza are challenging the city’s use of an emergency exemption to decommission the sculpture. The exemption in question, part of the California Environmental Quality Act, can only be used in the case of a “sudden, unexpected occurrence” that requires “immediate action,” leaving no time for a proper review.
The state of the Vaillancourt Fountain’s disrepair does not meet this standard, argues Friends of the Plaza lawyer Susan Brandt-Hawley. Therefore, she has filed an appellate petition to prevent the ongoing demolition of the public artwork. “There is no emergency,” she writes, in defense of the fountain, which she calls a “unique, storied resource of undisputed local, state, and national historic significance.”
