Wayside Drainpipe was inspired by advertisements for drainpipes that Claes Oldenburg saw in a Swedish newspaper. The stones forming the pyramid around the sculpture’s base were collected from Storm King’s property; water flowing through the drainpipe above is improbably channeled onto them. Over the course of three decades, Oldenburg and his wife, the curator and art historian Coosje van Bruggen, collaborated on inventive and often humorous monumental public art projects for cities around the world. Many of these works, which Van Bruggen called their Large-Scale Projects, have since become widely known. 

Oldenburg and Van Bruggen had several ideas for drainpipe sculptures, many of which were fantastical and, ultimately, unrealized. They originally envisioned the drainpipe that now resides at Storm King as a grand waterfall, to be erected in the city of Toronto, with the T shape at the top of the sculpture signaling the city’s name. In this version, Oldenburg noted, “The drainpipe has a pool at the top. The water runs down through the pipe, and then out into this waterfall at the bottom. And actually, the top is a landing strip for planes; so that you land on a hard surface over the water. People are swimming in the water, so they can look up at the planes landing on top of them and see the passengers get out.” Storm King’s Wayside Drainpipe joins a handful of indoor drainpipe sculptures completed by the artists, as well as drawings of these and other public monuments, and is the largest version of a drainpipe that Van Bruggen and Oldenburg carried out.