Used Water Bottle “Art”

If you’ve seen the funny looking polls with water bottles on top in Rosslyn, here’s an answer as to how much that little display cost - $50,000 (according to this Washington Post story).

Normally if you lined up empty water bottles on a Rosslyn median strip, you could be fined as much as $2,500 for littering. But in one case Arlington County paid $50,000 to have hundreds of bottles arranged into a piece of public art that looks like a field of luminescent cattails.

The installation is at one of Rosslyn’s busiest intersections: the exit of Arlington Boulevard where Fairfax Drive, Fort Myer Drive and North Lynn Street all intersect. The piece consists of plastic columns on a grid, ranging in height from 5 to 13 feet and held aloft by metal reinforcing rods, with used water bottles — culled from country government offices — perched atop each stalk. At night, LED lights powered by a single solar panel illuminate the bottles — a no-emissions form of power that inspired the work’s name, “CO2LED.”

That’s right, it cost $50,000 to raid the recycling bins from county offices and perch them on poles and light them up, but hurry up and see them because the display comes back down sometime after September 1st.

The field of bottles is temporary, built to be part of the landscape of the Planet Arlington World Music Festival on Sept. 1, after which it will come down. Angela Anderson Adams, public art administrator for Arlington County Cultural Affairs, says the piece makes distinctive use of urban space. It’s also a test case of what to do with an intersection.