Welder gets contract to build big stainless-steel sculpture at OSU

By KYLE ODEGARD

Gazette-Times reporter

Rusty Pattieshaw's latest job for Prater Industrial, a construction contractor, was a bit out of the ordinary:

The 58-year-old Corvallis resident had to create and assemble a huge stainless steel sculpture that looks like a giant loop, for display on the Oregon State University campus.

"I've been a welder and boilermaker all my life, and now all of the sudden I'm an artist," Pattieshaw said. "I've done a lot of stuff similar to this, but never a sculpture. It's always been heating coils in a tank. But if you can work metal, you can work metal, and I've been at it at long time."

Pattieshaw recently completed the artwork after taking three weeks to fabricate it and nearly three weeks to put it up.

The sculpture, called Solar Sonat, was designed by Berkeley-based artist Po Shu Wang. It is 26 feet tall and 20 feet wide, and it's located on the north side of Kelley Engineering Center.

This is the second time the sculpture has been assembled for display, said John Gremmels, design and construction senior project manager for OSU.

"The people who fabricated it the first time made just about every mistake they could," Pattieshaw said.

The original contractor even set up the sculpture so that it faced the opposite direction from Wang's design.

Kelley Engineering Center had its grand opening in October 2005, but the sculpture had to be taken down in March 2006, Gremmels said, because it had started to crack and become unsafe. Wang subsequently sued the original contractor.

Prater Industrial received a $64,000 contract to again construct Solar Sonat. That was nearly identical to Wang's original contract with OSU for the sculpture, Gremmels said. "Other than getting his art up, Po Shu didn't get paid all that much."

Solar Sonat was part of an Oregon initiative, enacted in 1975, under which 1 percent of direct construction costs for the state are set aside for public artwork. Oregon is one of 27 states with the "one percent for art" stipulation.

Pattieshaw's jobs usually are focused on function. He makes sure his work is sound, not necessarily pretty, and hurries on to the next job. For the sculpture, he had to slow down and make sure all the pieces and welds were almost perfect. But the job - or maybe the sculpture itself - brought out the artist in him.

"I enjoyed it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's the kind of job you always wish you could do," he said.

Kyle Odegard covers Oregon State University. He can be contacted at kyle.odegard@lee.net or 758-9523.