Border crossing revamp comes with art

Commissioned pieces part of rebuilt San Ysidro border port of entry

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Northbound drivers at the San Ysidro border crossing can look forward to the opening of more lanes next month — and hopefully shorter lines. As they enter the United States, they will also encounter art: ripples of bright blue light whose constant motion is triggered by the passing cars.

As the busiest border crossing in the western hemisphere undergoes amassive $741 million reconstruction, security and efficiency have been the foremost concerns. But art? The completed San Ysidro Port of Entry will have several large-scale pieces.

Two artworks already have been funded, one of them scheduled for unveiling in November, a month after the expected opening of all northbound vehicular inspection lanes and inspection booths. This month, the U.S. General Services Administration, which is overseeing the reconstruction, said $500,000 is available for the next round, andinvited qualified artists to apply by Oct. 6.

The rebuilding of the port of entry is a phased, multi-year undertaking that includes additional inspection booths, new pedestrian processing facilities, and the rerouting of Interstate 5. It has been approved by Congress, but tight federal budgets of recent years have slowed its progress. Two of the three phases now have been funded, and the Obama administration has included $226 million in its proposed fiscal 2015 budget for the project’s completion.

Federal regulations require the GSA to allocate a half percent of the cost of each new project for public art, and funding for the San Ysidro art work is tied to the various phases.

Under the first phase, which has involved more northbound vehicle inspection booths and a new southbound pedestrian crossing, the GSA allocated $912,000 for two commissions: $561,000 for Meejin Yoon’s“Double Horizon” and $350,000 for a piece by Seattle artist Norie Satoto be installed in the southbound pedestrian lane.

Yoon’s piece is a narrow 520-foot-long installation consisting of programmable light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and is being mounted to the edge of the canopy above the inspection booths that face the northbound lanes. The drivers will not only view its motion, but trigger it as they cross.

“I wanted the piece to be as minimal as possible,” Yoon, an architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a telephone interview from her Boston studio. “I wanted it to not be a pattern, but truly an index or a measurement of the flow through it. It becomes a dynamic display as people cross.”

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