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The museum’s new location between Marine Drive and Jefferson Street will open next summer, and the festival will move there.
“Next year, people will not only get to enjoy the sand sculptures and all of our activities, but they’ll also be able to go into the museum as well,” said Patty Belmonte, the museum’s executive director.
The new museum will be much larger and incorporate lots of outdoor space – and will also be more environmentally friendly, with features including showers for employees to encourage bicycle commuting.
It will be the first children’s museum in the Northwest to be LEED certified for its green building features and the first in the country to be Green Globe certified, Belmonte said.
Sand in the City – which features entertainment, games and crafts and food, as well as the sculptures – has long been an environmentally friendly festival, Belmonte said. For example, 52 percent of the trash it produces has been recycled or composted. This year, there’s even more emphasis on that with volunteers helping people sort out recyclable and compostable items, and cornstarch cups being used for beverages at tonight’s gala.
“We’ll have solar play,” said Sunny King, the museum’s events manager. “Kids can float the boats that they make at Sand in the City in a water chute that’s powered by solar power, and we’ll have a bubble maker that’s solar-powered as well.”
Sand sculpting is inherently environmentally friendly, said Elizabeth Diane, a team architect for the event. The sand is reused year after year – and tools used to create the sand forms and carve them can easily be made of reused materials.
A team architect is assigned to each team to draw up plans and advise the teams on what can be carved from the packed and pounded sand-and-water mixture.
“You want to create things with more of a pyramidal structure,” said Diane, owner of Lucid 9 Design in Olympia. “If there’s too much above and not enough support below, things can collapse.”
This will be her eighth year serving as an architect for various community teams. This year she’s working with the Heritage Bank team.
“I was nervous the first year,” she said. “It didn’t really feel like I knew what I was doing.
“But it was a blast. By the end of the day, we were all amazed at what we’d created. That’s what got me hooked.”
She said she enjoys working with sand so much that last year she joined a local sand-sculpting team called Wabi Sabi. This summer, the team took first place at competitions in Long Beach and Cannon Beach, Ore. Diane also has taught kids about sand sculpting.
She doesn’t mind that the art she creates is impermanent. Although they can last a few weeks if they’re not damaged by high winds, heavy rains or ocean waves – but the sculptures for Sand in the City are taken down at the end of the weekend.
“I look at the whole process as athletic performance art,” she said. “When I start carving, there’s a oneness, a connection between what’s in my mind and what’s coming out in the sand.”
