Calder Rides High in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park; New Museum Branch Disappoints

Bloomberg, January 19, 2007

The Seattle Art Museum’s new Olympic Sculpture Park, which opens this weekend, hugs the northern edge of downtown. It looks west to a wide panorama of Elliott Bay, with its ferry and freighter bustle, and beyond to the Olympic Mountains (after which the park is named).

The museum obtained its extraordinary, nearly nine-acre site by acting quickly in 2000 through the local Trust for Public land, which brokered an offer from Unocal (now Chevron Corp.) for what was then an oil-storage facility.

Then, in 2001, banking giant Washington Mutual Inc. entered a deal to expand the museum’s main building downtown into a tower the bank would build. Hardworking trustees have neared the fund-raising goal of $180 million for both projects.

As it zigs and zags toward the bay, the park gracefully leaps over both busy Elliott Avenue and the rumbling trains on a main line of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. It culminates in a tiny driftwood-ringed beach that’s been scrubbed from industrial squalor to ecological health.

Can mere art compete with this melange of urban bustle and natural glory? It thrives. When I visited recently, the tomato- soup-red hull of an anchored freighter precisely matched the color of Alexander Calder’s monumental stabile “Eagle,” which has already become the park’s iconic work. The swelling shape of the ship’s hull echoed the curves of Richard Serra’s looming five-part, weathered-steel sculpture “Wake.”

The ever-changing weather, light and activity spur such ricocheting associations and constantly reveal something new about the works on view.

Graceful Pavilion

The understated design of the park, by the Manhattan-based husband-and wife partners Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, begins with a graceful metal-and-glass orientation pavilion that appears to emerge from the ground in long, interlocking triangular facets.

A path gently descends from the pavilion (dropping 40 feet in all), from which wedge-shaped planes of lawn and native-plant meadow fold down to meet the street below.

One subsidiary path leads into a grove of quaking aspen, the work of landscape architect Charles Anderson. Come warm weather, its rustling leaves will obscure traffic noise and glint like sequins in the breeze. Secreted in this grove, Tony Smith’s “Stinger” takes on a haunting, totemic power.

Open to All

Unlike most sculpture gardens, this one is open all around so that art and city intermingle, thanks to a $20 million gift of board trustees Jon and Mary Shirley, who have endowed free entry in perpetuity. Bicyclists and joggers share their waterside path with a stone bench by Louise Bourgeois -- shaped as a giant staring eyeball -- and the rusted blades of Mark di Suvero’s “Schubert Sonata” twisting regally in the breeze.

Serra has fallen in love with the park, calling it a “sea change in the artist’s relationship to the public.” (He acted as docent during a recent press preview.) “Instead of art accenting lifestyles only a few can have, kids will play around these works,” he said, “and come to know the difference between a Smith, a Serra and a Calder.”

The story is less sanguine a mile south, where Washington Mutual has built a characterless 42-story bank headquarters, with 118,000 square feet devoted to the museum clamped onto its side by architect Brad Cloepfil, the principal of Allied Works, in Portland, Oregon. (Cloepfil is known in New York for the controversial reconstruction currently under way at Columbus Circle of the Huntington Hartford Museum into the Museum of Art and Design.)

Sliding Panels

Cloepfil has attached an $86-million bustle in overlapping planes of silvery metal panels to contrast with the glassy mediocre prism designed for the bank by Seattle architect NBBJ. The panels slide, shoji style, to modulate daylight inside. The result, while diplomatic, is ambivalent: not quite an office building, nor persuasively a museum.

Inside, Cloepfil tries to overcome the office building’s structural necessities by interleaving floors at half levels. In this way he varies the size and proportion of galleries and opens diagonal vistas to the windows as visual relief, since most of the works are displayed in rooms far from daylight. The museum will gradually take space back from the bank (ultimately a total of 300,000 square feet), but it will stretch over a visitor-intimidating 10 levels.

Regrettably, the building fails to transcend the workaday, which is surprising, coming from an architect capable of orchestrating visual drama.

The theatrics may need to come from the art. The May 5 opening spectacle sounds promising: For “Inopportune: Stage One” artist Cai Guo-Qiang has hung some half-dozen cars from the ceiling that appear to be somersaulting across the main-floor gallery.