gasworks park (seattle parks #1)

It’s unusual to first encounter Gasworks Parks (Richard Haag, 1975) as a view from a boat. It’s created on a promontory that sticks out into Union Lake and faces straight on the view of the downtown skyscrapers. Their shiny straight forms mirror reverse the rusted twisted metal structure of the old gas workings. These are now defunct industrially but form the centrepiece, the eye catchers, the view frames, space markers of this public park. Seem from the water, they echo ruined castles and fortifications, and link the park to the continuing industry of the Union lake and canal shipyards.

My second experience was in the near dark, 9pm, dropping in with Lynne and her friend on our way home. The structures threw even darker complex silhouettes against the sky, lake and the pinpricked sparkling brilliance of the downtown lights. It was fairly busy, with kids and adults. Less daunting than many other parks by daytime, this busyness was chatty, cheerful, romantic. Two teenagers sat on a bench overlooking the bay looking at their apple mac. Sometimes at night you need extent, and this is a suitably weird urban dramatic place to get that fix.

 

My final visit was late morning, the least busy of all the three times. A few solitary sunbathers and readers finding their own grassy mound, bench, wide view. Mums with tots watching the boats, seaplanes, ducks… the gently paced comings and goings of the waterfront. Round the back of the barn area, some low-key gatherings of homeless and jobless and early hours drinking.

This park is inventive, uplifting, and just fun. With such a dramatic location, a blander, more conventional park would have sufficed, but here the structures and the landform give an appropriate drama and connection to the wider cityscape. You arrive, either from the bike path or the car park, breaking through a line of conifers and out into the light and views. Two main features give you your choice: the large steep hill or the main structures of the gasworks.

Climbing the hill demonstrates how amazingly well circulation networks responds to the topography. Significant but not sharp sloped paths curve up, gaining height and revealing views, making the climb a joy rather than a burden. A small dipped and rimmed mosaic paved area at the top gives a sense of arrival and robust standing and seating opportunities. You can walk down the curve of the landform to the waters edge. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better example of a designed landform that is huge enough to be exciting and rewarding, but inviting enough for parents with pushchairs to climb up and down.

Keeping the gasworks structures was the seminal distinction of the park design, a decision that seems less shocking now than they did 30 years ago. The monumentality is impressive, especially when up close and under them.

Some have been grafitted (not too much) and the biggest structural mass is fenced off. According to Lynne (who knows Haag as he still works at th Landscape Department at UW) the graffiti doesn’t bother him, but the fencing off is seen as a loss to current safety fears. There is also a ‘play barn’ which brightly painted large industrial components. For me, this was the least effective aspect of the site, somewhat sanitised, especially with ‘do not climb’ stencilled on the structures.

Structural planting is used sparing to good dramatic effect, and much more would start to encroach on the extent of the panorama. I was surprised that the ground cover was nearly all grass, with some hardstanding. This makes the park robust and multi-functional, but possibly in more ecologically sensitive times some rougher areas and diversity of texture might add to rather than detract from to the sense of place.

30 years old is a good length of time to assess a park. It’s a park worth travelling to see, and it’s a park worth living near. The structures of the gasworks give it a vivid iconography, but in many ways it’s the subtleties of the landform, the elegance of the paths and the relationship to the broad span of water that make it so alluring. These ensure it’s popular status, not as an example of landscape architecture land art, but as a place to chat, picnic, sunbathe, fly kites, read, protest, watch fireworks, have festivals, drink tea and rest your mind.

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