A WALK ACROSS HISTORY - LITERALLY

Landscape architect Larry Clark and I worked together to design this walkway, which runs through a courtyard connecting the hospital to a separate medical office building. Larry started with a beautiful map of the San Antonio River from 1764 — the Menchaca map — that shows the river, the Spanish missions, and a simple sketch of the surrounding landscape. Larry’s concept was to represent this map as the walkway.

It took a lot of work to lay this out. We had to scale up that two foot long map to a length of seventy feet, staking it out in the courtyard, matching all the map’s curves, to create a four-foot-wide undulating walkway.

Most of the detailed mosaic work — for the missions and the surrounding farmland — was done in my studio, placing mosaic tiles onto fiberglass mesh. The tiny mosaic pieces required for those elements couldn’t be placed on-site into wet mortar. Those detail pieces were then transported to the site and installed. Other parts of the mosaic, which used larger pieces including the river and acequias, were done on-site.