What will the wall look like? What shape or form will it take? Will its form be dictated by construction? How will light, both during the day and at night, affect the way the wall looks?

Good questions. The wall needs to represent more than a mass of recycled bottles. It needs to express the messages inside, and communicate the collective voice of everyone who contributed a piece of it. In order to arrive at a design for the wall, I am preparing a scale study model so that I can examine and evaluate different arrangements. To represent a bottle, I will use a plastic drinking straw. I found a case of them at Costco, 3,000 for $12. A typical water bottle is 2.5″ in diameter x 8″. The drinking straws were 3/16″ in diameter, which means they need to be cut into 0.6″ segments to match the proportions of a bottle. I can get 12 segments from each straw, which means I can model 36,000 bottles.

The planter in Main Street Park where the wall will be constructed is 210′ long and 18′ wide. In order to maintain the scale of the bottles to the straws (which is 13.33:1), the planter needs to be 189″ long (that’s 15′-9″) and 17″ wide. Now that’s a big model! I have some cardboard boxes that I rescued from the furniture movers and some foamcore…onwards with the model.