The Square

2019 Festival of Flowers | Paint the Town designed by Walker Macy
2019-05-22 - 2019-06-07 | Pioneer Courthouse Square, 701 SW 6th Ave., Portland, OR, 97204, United States
Floral Installation: May 22 – June 4
Flower Sale: June 5 – 7
Festival of Flowers is one of Portland’s most innovative festivals that has been held in our City’s Living Room for over 30 years. Each year, the Square’s non-profit management organization collaborates with local designers and regional growers to create a one-of-a-kind large-scale design of vibrant color utilizing over 24,000 flowers and plants. This year, in partnership with Portland’s own award-winning landscape architecture firm, Walker Macy, Pioneer Courthouse Square is pleased to announce the Festival 2019 design theme: Paint the Town.
Paint the Town is a tribute to the 35th anniversary of Pioneer Courthouse Square and its transformative role within Portland’s Downtown Plan. During the 1970’s our City’s Living Room was nothing more than a surface parking lot. After a national design competition was held in 1980 the winning design team, composed of five talented Portlanders, took bold action and painted their winning design directly onto the parking lot deck where the Square stands today. This guerrilla act of community expression helped to show Portland what that uninspiring parking lot could be; a vibrant, active, inclusive gathering place for the people of Portland. Today, Walker Macy honors that original vision by repainting the Design Team’s bold artistic statement with more than 24,000 vibrant flowers. The design integrates with the original architecture of the Square, highlighting its spatial arrangement and will fill a large area of the Square with a rainbow of flowers on the floor of the Square and vertically along the stoa columns to make for a multi-dimensional floral environment with striking views from above.
Walker Macy’s choice to build interactive arts within this bold design serves as a tribute to the late Doug Macy; Original member of the Square’s design team, contributor to the Festival of Flowers, and long-time supporter of art and artists. Doug and the rest of the original design team saw Pioneer Courthouse Square for what it could become and is today: “A symbol as a special living room; walls defined by the changing elements of the city; the roof formed by the sky, complete in its design only when occupied by its urban family.”
