Living Alongside Art: How Sculpture Transforms a Community

Most people experience great art on a schedule, a museum visit, a gallery afternoon, a curated occasion. At Optima Kierland, we believe great art shouldn’t require an appointment. It should be part of the texture of daily life, as present and as natural as the Scottsdale light that moves across these towers each morning.

Art as Architecture, Not Addition

At Optima Kierland, the relationship between art and architecture isn’t decorative, it’s structural. From the earliest stages of design, public art and sculpture are considered alongside the placement of walls, windows, and open space across all five towers. The result is that art here doesn’t feel installed or displayed. It feels native, as though the buildings and the artworks emerged from the same intention. This is a direct expression of Optima’s founding design philosophy: that the built environment should engage the whole person. The mind, not just the body. The eye, not just the foot.

The Encounter You Didn’t Plan

There is a particular quality to discovering art when you’re not looking for it. A large-scale piece in the lobby that stops you on the way to the elevator on a Wednesday morning, seen in a completely different light than it was the week before. A sculpture in the residents’ club that you’ve walked past a hundred times but only truly noticed today, in this light, at this angle, the shadows it casts shifting with the hour, the colors catching something different in the afternoon sun than in the cool of the morning.

Optima Kierland is home to two of David Hovey Sr., FAIA’s most distinctive works, both of which live at the intersection of Modernist rigor and surprising human warmth. Duo, crafted out of steel as a striking, abstract silhouette, evokes the image of a man and woman gazing into one another’s eyes. Hovey has described how he rarely approaches a piece of steel with the intention of drawing out specific imagery. Rather, he imagines how to explore form through size, shape, voids and shadows, the lights and sounds that emanate from the manipulation of the material. With Duo, the study of duality and opposites through curved lines, fierce angles, symmetry and asymmetry produced something deeply human as a result of a process that was entirely formal. It is the kind of discovery that rewards return visits, each time revealing something that wasn’t noticed before.

Silver Fern offers a different kind of encounter. Uniquely two-dimensional among Hovey’s works, it explores the nature of a flat piece of steel: smooth planes laser-cut with circles and triangles that create depth through shadows and voids rather than physical dimension. In the 7160 tower, two iterations of Silver Fern stand side by side, one in brilliant orange, one in striking yellow, their curves blending into an undulating pattern visible through the front glass curtain wall to anyone approaching through the courtyard, activating the space with energy before a resident has even stepped inside. At 7180, a Silver Fern swathed in neon green plays bold contrast against the Modernist red chairs in the lobby.

These unplanned encounters accumulate. Quietly, persistently, they enrich the daily experience of a place and remind residents that they live somewhere that considers beauty not a luxury but a necessity.

Sculpture and the Identity of a Place

Great public sculpture does something architecture alone cannot: it gives a community a visual anchor, a sense that this particular place is unlike any other. At Optima Kierland, David Hovey Sr., FAIA’s works are conceived as part of the community itself, not acquired or placed after the fact, but grown from the same design intelligence that shaped the buildings around them. The North Scottsdale light that makes Duo look different at noon than at dusk. The glass curtain wall that turns Silver Fern into a first impression for every arriving resident. Art isn’t applied to this community. It belongs to it.

The Everyday Experience of Living With Art

Residents who live alongside meaningful art tend to describe something that’s difficult to quantify but easy to feel: a sense that their home takes them seriously. That the people who built it believed beauty was a foundation, not an afterthought. Over time, the art woven through Optima Kierland becomes part of each resident’s relationship with home, a shared reference point between neighbors, a source of daily pleasure as light shifts across the courtyards and towers, a quiet reminder that this place rewards attention.

An Invitation to Look More Carefully

In a world that rewards speed, an artwork that asks for your full attention for a moment is a quiet shift in pace. And a home that offers those moments, day after day, around every corner and across every season, is something genuinely rare. At Optima Kierland, that’s not incidental. It’s the design.

Come see the art that lives here. Schedule a tour at Optima Kierland and experience a home worth looking at.