Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt

Flower Pauses

Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt designed Flower Pauses to help with road improvements and keep Scottsdale’s commitment to enhancing pedestrian and bicycle amenities. They were selected to design improvements for the project based upon their urban interventions that create the extraordinary out of the ordinary. The artist team was greatly impressed with the cooperative nature of the neighborhoods as observed at the community focus group in May of 2005. Both artists learned that many neighbors knew one another and visited each other’s homes.

In addition to contributing to the overall landscape design, including the selection of the trees to line the roadway, Behar and Marquardt created a series of park-like open home vignettes at intermittent seating nodes to reflect this neighborly quality.  Each node has a patterned floor and a garden bench, some nodes have multiples when space allowed. There are six nodes to encounter while walking Indian School Road between Pima and Drinkwater.