olympic sculpture park (seattle parks # 3)

The Olympic Sculpture Park (opened 2007, landscape by Weiss/Manfredi Architects) has what my dad would probably call a ‘gee wizz’ design. You’re right that this isn’t entirely a compliment. It’s a bit showy, a bit trying to do everything, more for walking through and admiring the cleverness and statement of the landscape than for staying in and relaxing. Though, to be fair, there’s an underpinning of north western landscape qualities to the design, and it tries to meet a difficult brief of leading people through a complex set of level changes and giving an appropriate setting for a wide range of modern art pieces. I don’t usually listen to music when I walk around outside, but in this case ‘Take Fountain’ (by the Wedding Present, largely written and recorded in Seattle) was a perfect aural landscape.

 

My highlight was a set of 5 wave structures in rusted steel by Serra (wake, 2005). The usual monumentality you would expect from Serra, but the mass and space through and around was captivating and playful. There were a number of school groups visiting when I was there and there was something about it that provoked running, leaping, chasing. Fun.

This is my attempt at uploading a sideshow… let’s see if it works! wow it does!!

 

Note. A paper I heard presented at the Sacramento conference on the holocaust memorial in Berlin also mention the lure of paths around large abstract sculpture as having ‘playground like qualities’; of (more controversial) running, hiding, jumping. Maybe abstract landscapes (as opposed to isolated forms) free us to respond in less inhibited ways, to allow ourselves to play.

The Seattle Center was generally a rather run-down over scaled 70s convention centre landscape, dated Dr Who-esque. The space needle was surrounded by cutsy and fading childrens’ fairground rides. But the generous, enormous, dramatic International fountain made up for it all.

I don’t consider myself a Rem Koolhaas junky, but the new central library is an amazing building: uplifting, egalitarian, and techno-funky. The library equivalent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory with an appropriate 21^st century minimalism aesthetic). Floors that spiral round in a Dewey system ordered ramp, a bulging red floor of meeting rooms, mini conveyer belts of returned books overhead, chunky squashy seats. As my America friends would say, “What’s not to love?”

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