Olympic Sculpture Park

The camera stands directly under the Eagle, which is the only way to understand it. Calder’s sculpture is a stabile - it does not move - and from underneath it stops being an object across a lawn and becomes a structure you are inside: four great tapering red steel legs planted around you, and the whole thing arching over the top of the view with the sky showing between the plates. It is painted a single flat vermilion, and against a clear winter sky it is almost violent. Look out through the legs one way and there is Elliott Bay, grey and flat, with the Olympic Mountains on the far side and people along the shore path. Look the other way and the city is right there - the Space Needle, cranes, apartment blocks - because this park is a strip of former industrial waterfront wedged between the water and the traffic, not a garden somewhere out of town.

The Olympic Sculpture Park is a beautiful waterfront destination in Seattle that features an outdoor museum and a beach, with the highlight being a free-admission public outdoor sculpture park. It is a unique attraction of the city and a newer one, relatively to the rich history of Seattle. In 1996, Mimi Gardner Gates, the director of the Seattle Art Museum, and Martha Wyckoff, a trustee of the Trust for Public Land, combined their expertise and hatched an idea to create an outdoor space for contemporary art in the city of Seattle. A $30 million donation from Jon Shirley, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Seattle Art Museum and Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft, made this dream a reality.

Taking advantage of the stunning views, the founders decided to transform a former oil depot at the north end of the city’s waterfront, not a far walk from historic Pike Place Market. After a substantial cleaning and construction project, Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park opened on January 20, 2007, as one of the largest urban art spaces in all of the United States. Since then, this park has received many prestigious awards, including Travel + Leisure Design Award for best cultural space in 2008.

Due to the Seattle Waterfront’s delicate geological position, the shoreline was reinforced before building the park itself. Most of this important work, however, lies hidden underwater as part of a three level slope of rocks, meant to break up the waves and attract sea life, including salmon from the nearby Duwamish River. Above this slope, a 1,000-foot long seawall was also built to protect the park.

Upon close inspection of Alexander Calder’s Eagle, this large red steel structure appears almost rigid. Yet, viewed against the backdrop of Seattle’s Elliott Bay, this piece takes on the elegant figure of an eagle in flight. Originally created in 1971, Eagle was proudly donated by founding donors Jon and Mary Shirley. Another formidable nautical structure is Wake by Richard Serra. Three hundred tons of curved steel structures stand together like the hulls of a ship or the wakes of a wave. As a testament to their authenticity, these pieces were built using machines that manufacture ship and submarine parts.