If you don't regularly venture out to the far west side of Salt Lake City—where warehouses outnumber homes—you probably haven't come across this pair of embedded shipping containers on the outside of buildings near 4800 W. California Ave. and 5600 W. 300 South (above).
No doubt, when you first see one you can't help but wonder, "what exactly happened here?"
Are these the scenes of the wildest industrial accidents OSHA has ever witnessed? The remnants of one of the all-too-frequent Salt Lake windstorms? Or maybe this is the source of some of the supply chain issues we keep hearing about?
Nope! The two pieces above are actually art installations located in one of the most art-unfriendly areas imaginable. Regardless of their intended purpose, the containers are certainly eye-catching, breaking up the monotony of the large, mostly unadorned buildings that are found way out west near the city limits.
A casual look on the Salt Lake County Tax Assessor's website, plus a little bit of online sleuthing, traces the ownership of both of these two particular distribution centers to a company called Price Real Estate.
If the name sounds familiar, it may be because Price is also responsible for the series of seemingly out of place, but nonetheless interesting, animal sculptures along South Temple near downtown (below).
That menagerie includes an incredibly lifelike ostrich—which I'd imagine Hogle Zoo wouldn't mind getting their hands on—as well as a couple of rhinoceroses, one of which stands stoically outside the Price Real Estate company office building.
Price's public art extends well past the animal kingdom. Recently, a 15-foot-tall pencil—appropriately entitled "On Point—was installed out front of 242 E. South Temple. In fact, you can stay downtown and see a scavenger hunt-worthy amount of "Price Pieces," though the shipping container sculptures out west make for a fun trip—especially if you want to thoroughly confuse any out-of-town visitors.
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