Olympic Sculpture Park

The camera stands on open grass with the ground falling away on one side into a concrete-walled cut, and there is a road down there with traffic on it. That is the whole idea of this park in one view: the site was severed by Elliott Avenue and the railway, so the landscape is built as a continuous zigzag that bridges straight over both and keeps going to the water. From up here you can see the seam - lawn, then a hard grey edge, then cars, then lawn again. Calder’s red Eagle stands away to one side, small from this distance, and past it the shore path and Elliott Bay with the Olympic Mountains on the far shore. Turn inland and the city closes in immediately: a curved glass office block, tower cranes, apartment buildings and the Space Needle. There is old snow left in the shadows along the path.

The Olympic Sculpture Park occupies nine acres of Seattle waterfront that used to be a fuel storage and transfer site for Unocal. The Seattle Art Museum opened it as a free public park in 2007, after a cleanup that took years.

The park is built as a continuous Z-shaped path descending forty feet from Elliott Avenue to the shoreline, crossing both a working railway and the road on the way down. The sculpture sits along that route rather than in a gallery, with the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound behind it.