Even those who don’t know David Dahlquist have probably seen his work. Whether it’s the design and art elements at interstate rest areas throughout Iowa, distinctive public sculptures such as “Echo Obelisk” in Urbandale or the huge “Hand and Land” mural inside the Varied Industries Building on the Iowa State Fairgrounds, Dahlquist’s influence is evident throughout both Greater Des Moines and Iowa.

Unless you happen to be a Charlotte Bobcats fan, however, you may not be aware that the Des Moines artist co-designed the ornamental columns adorning the recently Charlotte Bobcats Arena in North Carolina. Across the country, he has also collaborated on a streetscape project for the city of San Jose, Calif., for a grouping of glazed terra-cotta sculptures called “Parade of Floats.”

“Many years ago, there were studios that were doing similar things to what I’ve been trying to do, that is, integrate art into architecture and the landscape, and do it almost like the old craft guild apprenticeships of the Middle Ages,” said Dahlquist.

In June 2004, Dahlquist merged his company, Dahlquist Clayworks Inc., into RDG Planning & Design. The merger has allowed RDG to make art an integral part of its projects, he said.

“I’ve worked with RDG off and on for better than 15 years,” said Dahlquist, who is now a partner with the architectural firm. “They really saw the possibilities of integrating artwork in large and small projects, whether that means a floor pattern, a mural on the floor, doorways, a lot of lighting, columns, arches, keystones, it runs the gamut.

“And they’re very talented people. So for me, as a public artist, I’ve been able to work in a very exciting way in a multidisciplinary approach with an architect, with a landscape architect, with an engineer, with the owner, to develop concepts: What is the story, in effect, and how can we embody that story in visual, sculptural things? And a lot of times, they’re not just decorative elements; they’re functional elements. They do double duty.”

Take the Bobcats Arena project. Working in collaboration with another artist, Andrew Leicester, RDG Dahlquist Studio created a series of large columns molded to resemble cotton bobbins in recognition of the region’s heritage as a textile production center. “They’re almost more like Egyptian sarcophagi, built into the walls,” he said.

In a major public art project for Sioux City, RDG Dahlquist recently restored the Roth Memorial Fountain using bricks and the re-creation of some new terra-cotta pieces based on the design of the historic Livestock Exchange Building.

In another project, the company is fabricating a 9-foot-tall, 24-foot-wide stained-glass window for the second-floor conference room of the Iowa Department of Public Safety Building that’s now being renovated near the Capitol. The pattern on the glass will resemble a magnified fingerprint.

At the same time, RDG Dahlquist is exploring the niche market of producing various lines of handcrafted ornamental products based on elements designed for past projects. An example is a set of interlocking, ivy-leaf-shaped pavers his company used to form a plaza for an arts and crafts garden at the Hotel Pattee in Perry. The company is now producing various other leaf shapes that can be similarly embedded into concrete or sand.

RDG Dahlquist also produces various styles of terra-cotta blocks that architects have used in place of standard concrete blocks for various projects.

“We’ve done quite a bit of linear banding that way,” he said. “Some of these blocks have text so you could use them as signage; others have patterns. Right now we’re working on some elements that may end up in a sports complex in Coralville that’s based on Iowa farm vernacular.”

The company also plans to produce a series of decorative urns based on a design by famed architect Louis Sullivan, in both terra cotta and stone and with a choice of three sizes and colors. Sullivan was instrumental in rebuilding Chicago after it was largely destroyed in the 1871 Fire.

“That’s something that architects years ago would be thinking about,” Dahlquist said. “Artists and architects would work together to make handmade elements for buildings, and here we are, doing it again. … What I’ve been trying to say as a teacher for 20 years, there are artists and craftspeople out there like myself that can put these handcrafted items back into buildings.”

For Dahlquist, organizing the gallery as a business rather than as a non-profit enterprise proved to be an important decision.

“I think that was important for many reasons,” he said. “I believed I could react faster at the time. I believed as an individual artist I had more freedom that way. You weren’t constantly having to prove yourself in order to get another grant. However, you did have to constantly find the next project. So that’s a creative challenge, to keep work coming in the door.”

Dahlquist, who was the artist in residence at the Des Moines Art Center from 1983 to 1988, later worked as an art instructor at Iowa State University before starting his own studio. After operating a studio on the east side of town for five years, he moved into the Art 316 Building at 316 S.W. Fifth St. in 1993. The current location serves as both a nexus for community pottery and sculpture classes and a separate production studio for the business.

“As an artist, I was always working large-scale, and growing up, I was always interested in architecture,” he said. “I was raised in a suburb of Chicago, and many, many weekends I would go down to the Art Institute with my mother. I would be looking at all the details: griffins, gargoyles, tilework surrounds around doorways, grotesques. I guess it was important to me even then.

“About 20 years ago, I became more and more interested in architecture and the relationship of ceramics and the history of clay in architecture and (the use of) tile work and color as a way of integrating a story.”

As a member of the Governor’s Summit on the Arts in the late 1990s, Dahlquist was involved in an initiative known as the Iowa Charrette, later renamed Design Iowa, to involve artists early on in the design of public projects. “So instead of art being window dressing after the fact, if there was any budget left anyway, now, we have the artist develop the iconography, the history, the background,” he said.

That led to his work with the Iowa Department of Transportation for the Art in Transit project, in which he worked as a member of a multidisciplinary team to design and build art elements for seven themed rest areas and welcome centers across the state.

Now, Dahlquist is considering where the road may lead for future Art in Transit projects.

“We’ve talked about Henry Wallace and the first soil conservation district in America. We’ve talked about Iowa’s role in the Civil War. We’ve talked about the history of the railroad and transportation; the Underground Railroad; barge traffic on the Mississippi; the university and school systems. So there’s been a lot of time for me to travel the state and do research.”

His affiliation with RDG has led to consultation work for streetscape projects throughout the Midwest, from Bismarck, N.D., to Springfield, Ill. One of his next big streetscape projects will be in south Omaha.

“I sometimes call it ‘Gaudi meets the Midwest,’” he said. “It has a lot of tile in it. It’s based on a tree of life as a cross-cultural symbol. It embodies all the ethnicities of the people that have lived on that street: Croatian, Czech, Polish and now predominantly Hispanic.”

Does he feel he’s making the case for more art in architecture?

“I hope that I have, and I keep trying to,” he said. “I think the merger with RDG, to a large extent, says that it’s a good idea, and that they believed it to be one. It is a competitive advantage, I believe, to be able to say to a client, ‘We think about this project differently.’ We can not only design, but we can fabricate these pieces for you in a kind of one-stop-shop approach. I think it says we are a comprehensive firm, we have all these different disciplines, and as an outgrowth of this, we can make it real.”