S.F. fountain's 95-year-old creator returns: ‘I'm here to save that piece of art'

San Francisco Chronicle​

24-05-2025

The creator of the giant Vaillancourt Fountain at San Francisco's Embarcadero Plaza is aware that he may never see it restored to its former glory with water gushing through its white concrete pipes and channels.
But dry and dingy as it is, the monumental artwork has been there for nearly 55 controversial years, and Armand Vaillancourt says it can last another 55 at least.
That is why Vaillancourt, 95, made the six-hour flight from Montreal to San Francisco this week.
'I'm here to save that piece of art,' he said in a thick Quebecois accent while sitting in the sun Tuesday admiring his work.
The 40-foot-tall, 710-ton fountain, installed in 1971 next to the Embarcadero Freeway, has survived a legion of critics over the decades who decried its blocky Brutalist aesthetic. It also survived the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which damaged the freeway beyond repair.
But its supporters, including Vaillancourt, fear it may not survive the pending transformation of the park that surrounds it.
An ambitious $30 million project is underway to dramatically redesign Embarcadero Plaza, formerly known as Justin Herman Plaza, and link it to the adjacent Sue Bierman Park. The effort was announced last November by then-Mayor London Breed, and endorsed by the Board of Supervisors in March.
A preliminary rendering published with the announcement did not show the fountain. That got the attention of Vaillancourt's daughter Oceania, who informed her father.
The project is still in the planning phase. No design decisions have been made, no public hearings have been held, and Vaillancourt said no representative of the city has reached out to him.
But he did not like what he did not see on the renderings. So he booked his own flight and booked his own preemptive hearing this week with the staff of the San Francisco Arts Commission, which owns the sculpture as part of the Civic Art Collection.
'They made the new plan and my monumental sculpture is not there,' said Vaillancourt.
He described his message to city staff as, 'Be reasonable. Let that artwork live forever.'
'This survived a 7.1 earthquake with no damage, not a scratch, but they never took care of it,' he said. 'There's nothing wrong with it except the dirt.'
San Francisco Recreation and Park Department officials told the Chronicle that they had met with Vaillancourt on Wednesday. 'It was an initial conversation focused on listening and exploring ways we might work together going forward,' said spokesperson Tamara Aparton.
She said the park department spent an average of $100,000 per year on maintenance of the fountain, which includes repairing persistent leaks and clogged drains, servicing the pumps, removing debris and cleaning graffiti.
But the only recent sign of attention Vaillancourt said he could see was a high fence on the Embarcadero side, an apparent attempt by the city to keep people from sleeping on the sculpture. While he was there Tuesday, a security guard came and rousted people who seemed to be setting up camp.
He had not visited the fountain in eight years, and his first reaction upon seeing it was to utter: 'Wow.'
'The joy,' he said. 'It is so powerful.'
The fountain's sheer size is part of its artistic power — and a major issue in deciding its fate. Part of the civic discussion is whether it can be moved to another location in the city, or put into storage.
Vallaincourt laughed at that idea.
The fountain, which took him four years to build, is anchored to a foundation 40 feet deep and has steel cables running throughout. It was intended to shift and sway but never break, and did not even burst a pipe during the Loma Prieta quake.
However, it eventually blew a pump, and last summer the water was turned off. It would cost millions to repair, but Vaillancourt said it would cost millions more to demolish the fountain and backfill the huge crater that would leave behind.
He endorses whatever plan the city has for the plaza, which is likely to remove the brick and replace it with grass and trees or other natural elements. He said the fountain will go perfectly amid all of this, provided it is sandblasted to return it to its original white luster, and the water is turned back on. (When it was installed, the flow at 30,000 gallons a minute was intended in part to drown out the traffic noise from the adjacent freeway.)
'If you keep the sculpture like it is, people cannot enjoy it,' he said. 'When the water is on, the kids run through it. It's a big toy in a sense.'
The redesign and renovation is a partnership between the Recreation and Park Department, the Downtown SF Partnership and BXP (formerly Boston Properties), the commercial real estate firm that owns the four Embarcadero Center office buildings east of the plaza.
One community outreach meeting has been held by the park department, and a second one is to be scheduled sometime this spring or summer.
Vaillancourt said he has done his own community outreach and claimed that 'all of the people we talk to, engineers and architects and all that, they say do anything in the park but don't touch Vaillancourt Fountain.'
Skateboarders, who like to thrash up the concrete benches, don't want it touched. Neither do the members of the Northern California chapter of Docomomo US, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the architecture of the modern movement.
They will host an informal picnic at 4 p.m. Friday at the fountain, with Vaillancourt promising to attend and engage in any form of conversation or debate.
With his distinctive flowing white hair and beard, he describes himself as a 'small tiger,' and though he will be 96 in September, 'all my life I've never said I'm tired,' he said.
Then he leaned back to admire his creation and started singing a song that was popular when he was building it, with his wife, Joanne, and son Alexis looking on.
'All we are saying, is give peace a chance.'