Interest Building in Oxnard Over Landmark Tower : Officials Hope 8-Story Sculpture Near Highway Will Focus Attention on City

Most motorists think of Oxnard as the place they drive through on their way to somewhere else--such as Santa Barbara or Malibu. But not for long, if city officials get their way.

They hope that a towering piece of sculpture scheduled to be erected as early as April at Oxnard’s southern border on California 1 will change all that. “Connections,” as the eight-story concoction has been named by its Sonoma artist, is being touted as the burgeoning city’s magnet to the tourism that keeps passing it by.

“One thing’s for sure,” predicts Don Rideout, management analyst for the city’s Community Development Department, “people from outside the area will start to realize there’s more to Oxnard than they thought.”

Told Corp. of Newbury Park, the real estate developer that is paying for the sculpture under Oxnard’s Art in Public Places Program, is billing “Connections” as the city’s equivalent to Seattle’s Space Needle--or, for that matter, the District of Columbia’s Washington Monument or the Gateway Arch of St. Louis.

Officials in the city’s community development department, who since 1985 have required large commercial developments to include public art, won’t go that far. With two sculptures already standing, another in the works and at least nine coming down the pike, they are in no position to play favorites.

The ‘Tallest Sculpture’

They do confirm, however, Told’s boast that its collection of nine tightly grouped 80-foot poles, to stand at the $200-million Channel Islands Business Park, will constitute the “tallest sculpture on Highway 1 between Mexico and Canada.”

Apart from its annual Strawberry Festival, city officials have few tangible opportunities to pique the interest of passers-by visiting Oxnard’s attractions, which include the Channel Islands Harbor. Eventually, however, they hope to lead visitors through the whole town with a map of how to find the rest of the developers’ sculptures, says Rideout.

In the meantime, they will count on the black steel needles to coax tourists from the highway, which is lined with taco stands, muffler shops and budget motels. Rising above the rapidly developing Oxnard Plain, the work is expected to be visible for up to four miles, vying for attention with Oxnard’s two high-rise office buildings.

“This is definitely going to be a vertical landmark,” says Rideout.

The 48-year-old artist, Robert Behrens, says his similarly shimmering gateway to Fairbanks, Alaska, is the largest piece of modern sculpture in that state.

But mere attention was not what the developer was after, said V. Patrick Hall, president of Told. Rather, the firm’s officials were wowed by Behrens’ high-tech materials.

Company officials thought Behrens could best evoke the capabilities of its “smart park” site, which will be outfitted with fiber-optic networks to accommodate the latest in computer and data transmission equipment.

In fiber optics, Behrens said, “there is a pulse of information sent through lines of fiber as pieces of light and recombined into information. It’s the same thing with “Connections.” There are discrete pieces of light that make patterns that change as people approach the site.”

That quality stems from the artist’s liberal use of Mylar, a refracting surface that makes his works glow with an eerie incandescence that changes color as the viewers approach and recede.

The plastic material gives the poles the dynamic quality “of moving art such as a water fountain without the problems or expense,” Hall said.

Planning officials, meanwhile, gave Behrens a green light for another reason. They say his piece embodies the informal guidelines for its Art in Public Places Program, which calls for “something that complements the building but suggests some other values,” Rideout said.

They think its linear characteristics mimic those of the 135 yet-to-be-constructed buildings at the business park that will play home to tenants as diverse as the County of Ventura and Mercedes-Benz of America. At the same time, they say, the sculpture raises viewers’ sights far, far above the park, a former celery field.

“Its going to make people look skyward,” says Rideout. “And by emphasizing the colors and the sun, it hopefully will give people an appreciation of the outdoors, sunlight, color patterns--something other than the working world.”

At the very least, the sculpture, which will be imitated in two smaller pieces elsewhere in the park, is supposed to provide a spoonful of sugar for the medicine of economic development, Rideout says. He predicts the sculpture will “give something back to the people of Oxnard. When there is development in a city . . . certain intangibles are lost.”