You might be thinking: “What’s up with the flamingos?” They are part of VOTE!, a new permanent public artwork by artist Matthew Mazzotta installed at the newly constructed Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections building in Florida. The flamboyance consists of three 27-foot-tall birds and is matched with four oversize voting booths. The scene occupies a shallow yard in front of a tilt-up concrete wall painted light teal. Here, each flamingo assumes a different stance, meant to showcase the different ways each of us engages with our government. The point is to get people excited about the act of voting and trusting of the authority that collects and counts votes—all while educating residents along the way.
Mazzotta’s piece builds on the success of a prior Floridian commission. His piece titled HOME debuted in 2021 within the Main Terminal of the Tampa International Airport. This consists of an even-larger flamingo poking its head around below a mirrored ceiling, suggest that travelers are underwater. (The airport closed for three days following Hurricane Milton but soon reopened, though there was minor damage.) Mazzotta’s proposal for the sculpture was selected from a pool of 734 submissions. Upon completion, it went viral. Soon, the airport held a competition to name the flamingo. The winning moniker? Phoebe.
VOTE! is sited in a particularly significant location for current events: Palm Beach County is home to Mar-a-Lago, the Spanish Revival–style mansion commissioned by Marjorie Merriweather Post that is now owned by former President Donald Trump and operated as his high-end social club. And the elections building is a quick drive from the Trump International Golf Club in nearby West Palm Beach, where in mid-September an alleged gunman was discovered hiding in the bushes with a semiautomatic rifle waiting for Trump to play through to the sixth hole. An appreciation for guns is at times even built into our cities: Part of Trump’s golf course is bounded by Gun Club Road, which leads to Gun Club Estates, where the streets are named after gun manufacturers.
Of course, firearms have bipartisan appeal. During the second presidential debate, vice president Kamala Harris mentioned her own gun ownership. She discussed the subject with Oprah the following week. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said.
In a season where the presidential election feels like an existential crisis, it gets frustrating to intone a basic truth about the duty of voting while so much is on fire, flooded, drying up, bombed out, or falling apart. With all that’s happening, who cares about some cartoonish flamingos? VOTE! offers a much-needed bit of levity, and its humor has a point. “VOTE! urges us to consider the weight of voting on behalf of the people and beings who cannot vote but are affected by what we decide,” according to the piece’s project text. “What would be on Nature’s mind if it had a chance to vote?”
As it incorporates both sculptural form and textual information, Mazzotta’s piece can be read as both duck and shed. Speaking of which, in this issue find a heartfelt account of the premiere of Stardust, a new documentary about Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, which was screened during the New York edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival.
Our features tackle big, culturally significant operations in Los Angeles, Omaha, and New Orleans. Each stands to reshape how residents engage with major destinations. The cover sports a striking photograph by Monica Nouwens of the construction of an expanded California Science Center, designed by ZGF to hold the space shuttle Endeavor standing upright, seen from the Exposition Park Rose Garden. It, and Nouwens’s other shots, accompany reporting by Alissa Walker about the city’s race to make improvements ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics.
Our landscape section extends across all parts of the issue, from a studio visit with TEN × TEN Landscape Architecture to a pictorial that offers a glimpse at an architectural installation by DOMM at Bernheim Forest and Arboretum as part of its L+A+N+D (Landscape + Art + Nature + Design) effort, curated by Jenny Zeller.
Bookish items finish out this fall issue, including Alexander Luckmann’s review of Into the Quiet and the Light by Virginia Hanusik, whose photographs of Louisiana we ran in 2023, and Mimi Zeiger’s take on Iwan Baan’s Rome – Las Vegas, which contains an essay by Ryan Scavnicky that was previewed in this issue last year.
Read an excerpt of a fresh manifesto by Adam Rolston, who became an architect after growing up as a “middle-class assimilated Jewish gay kid…in L.A.” He navigates our contemporary crises with taut, Jenny Holzer–like dictions like this one: “In our age of compulsive confession, nothing is real unless it is made personal.”
Back to the birds: VOTE!’s arrangement has an open voting booth that is missing a pensive feathered occupant. While the absence suggests interaction for the purposes of an easy social media post, to me the deeper message is an invitation to participate in our democracy now, while we still have the chance.
