Vaillancourt Fountain was completed in 1971, designed by the 38-year-old Quebec artist in collaboration with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The fountain stands about 40 feet high, weighs approximately 700 tons, and is constructed from precast concrete square tubes arranged in a brutalist composition that looks, depending on your disposition, either like a work of powerful abstract art or like a freeway interchange that fell from the sky. It was built for $310,000 and positioned in a pool designed to pump up to 30,000 gallons of water per minute. San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King called it 'an act of defiant distraction until the freeway came down in 1991' -- the Embarcadero Freeway, which loomed over the plaza and the fountain for two decades.

When the fountain worked as intended, visitors could walk into it, climb its bridges, and stand behind curtains of falling water. Art critic Alfred Frankenstein noted in 1971 that 'the heart of the idea is the unique one of public entry into and intimate exploration of the fountain's innards.' But keeping 30,000 gallons per minute flowing requires maintenance that the city has been inconsistently willing to fund. The fountain was turned off during the 2011-2017 California drought to conserve water, and after the drought ended, the Recreation and Park department cited lack of funds for the estimated $500,000 in repairs needed to restore it. By the 2020s, the fountain stood dry, its concrete stained and cracking, its water features silent.

People have been trying to tear down the Vaillancourt Fountain almost since the day it was built. Multiple demolition proposals failed over the decades, but in 2025 the city determined the fountain to be a historic resource -- and then voted to remove it anyway, citing structural deterioration. The San Francisco Arts Commission approved the removal despite a cease-and-desist letter from Vaillancourt, by then 96 years old. The New York Times covered the dispute under the headline 'San Francisco Wants to Destroy a 96-Year-Old's Defining Artwork.' Plans for a new Embarcadero park call for the fountain's removal to create a public space twice the size of Union Square. Whether the fountain survives or falls, it will have achieved something remarkable: more than fifty years of making people argue about what public art is supposed to do.