Old City Infrastructure Becomes a Canvas on the Lake in WaterWork

For two nights this month, the Seaholm Intake Facility will become a large-scale projection surface for 15 works by 23 artists. WaterWork, a free event produced by Design Austin in partnership with the Trail Conservancy, returns September 25-26 under this year’s theme of “Transformation,” with works addressing nature, memory, identity, and place in a changing Austin. 

Organizers describe the historic facade as becoming a “vibrant canvas of art, light and sound.” But the idea of a canvas immediately suggests a blank surface, and nothing about this site is blank. Seaholm carries the history of Austin’s former power infrastructure, and Lady Bird Lake is more than a beautiful backdrop or reflective surface.

The Seaholm Intake Facility was finished in 1955 and served as the pump house for the Seaholm Power Plant, which supplied electricity to Austin until 1989. Inside, pumps drew water from the lake to cool the power plant. That history became a starting point for Austin-based creative technologist Lauren Schroeder, who had been thinking about heat and energy, from the enormous cooling demands of data centers to the everyday necessity of keeping cool in Austin. In Cool Vein, she imagines Seaholm as part aquarium, part factory, part living organism. As the water heats up, an underwater creature guides a giant pipe through the building to cool it down. Schroeder built the scene around Seaholm’s architecture, using its doors and windows as openings into an imagined watery interior. For a few minutes, the former infrastructure seems to be working again, now according to the playful logic of an aquatic ecosystem.

Still from Lauren Schroeder’s Cool Vein, 2026, created for WaterWork at the Seaholm Intake Facility Credit: Lauren Schroeder

Hillerbrand+Magsamen, a longtime husband-and-wife collaborative team based in Houston, approach Seaholm from a totally different direction. Port and Starboard began with something deliberately small: paper boats folded and moved by hands. An earlier version was projected vertically under the Allen’s Landing bridge along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, but Seaholm’s long horizontal facade required the artists to rethink and reshoot much of the work. 

“What interested us most was that the Seaholm building is not a flat projection surface,” they explain. Its windows, edges, recesses, and concrete divisions became part of their editing process, determining where boats travel, disappear, and emerge again into view. The facility also radically changes the project’s scale. Paper boats small enough to hold in one’s hand become monumental across the former industrial structure.

But the building is only one part of the visual field here. WaterWork can be watched from across Lady Bird Lake or from the water itself, so the audience’s distance and movement become part of the viewing experience. Hillerbrand+Magsamen are particularly curious about how the lake might “reflect, distort, or extend” their images in ways they cannot completely predict. 

Still from Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s Port and Starboard, 2026, created for WaterWork at the Seaholm Intake Facility Credit: Hillerbrand+Magsamen

Returning artist Mandy Mandelstein similarly resists treating Seaholm as “one big rectangular canvas.” Its long form and repeated insets led her to work with repetition, rhythm, and negative space to allow images to move in sequences across the building’s surface. Her relationship to the site extends beyond the building: Mandelstein is a rower who spends several days a week on Lady Bird Lake, where she has watched the water, wildlife, and surrounding landscape shift with the seasons. Her piece grows out of that repeated encounter, using patterns of urban movement with forms drawn from water, sky, plant life, and everyday activity.

But what else does this water carry besides reflected light? Lady Bird Lake is a managed urban reservoir and changing ecosystem – one Austin Watershed Protection has regularly monitored for potentially harmful cyanobacteria since 2019 – in a city facing extreme heat, extended droughts, and intense rain and flooding as a consequence of climate change. While WaterWork may address environmental questions less directly, it is presented by This Is Texas Water, a statewide campaign focused on helping Texans understand water and the systems that make it available, and its setting gives the projections an environmental charge of their own: a former piece of energy infrastructure located beside a body of water that is increasingly difficult to see merely as picturesque.  

For two nights, WaterWork makes a familiar piece of Austin’s waterfront appear weird. Its most interesting transformation may not be turning Seaholm into a screen. It is perhaps making it harder to see the building, and the water around it, as a neutral background.

Still from Mandy Mandelstein’s Day to Day, 2026, created for WaterWork at the Seaholm Intake Facility Credit: Mandy Mandelstein

WaterWork comes to Lady Bird Lake on September 25-26 and offers multiple viewing locations, both from the land and by boat, kayak, or paddle board. Find more information about boat tickets, kayak rentals, and trail viewing spots at https://designaustin.org/program/waterwork/.

The post Old City Infrastructure Becomes a Canvas on the Lake in WaterWork appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.