Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, designed by the New
York–based firm of Weiss/Manfredi, is a triumph of urban
reclamation. While the critical assessment of SAM’s sculptural works
has been mixed, the 8.5-acre brownfield turned waterfront park has
proven to be a hit with the public since it opened last January. There
is, however, one key element of the park that has, for the most part,
escaped critical scrutiny: the landscape design by Seattle’s own
Charles Anderson.
Anderson’s goals appear to be twofold. By limiting the plant species
to natives, he hopes to heal the site of its toxic industrial past by
allowing these supposed former occupants to reinhabit the place. Not
content to let their arrangement lack a grand concept, he invents a
dramatic context: a “mountains to sound” facsimile of the Seattle
region laid out upon the compass points and grade changes of the park
itself.
While the ideas behind the design speak to a love of the environment
and desire for a culture of sustainability, the design fails to take
sensory experience into account. Plus, many of the plants themselves,
while native to the region at large, are unsuited to the punishing
climactic conditions of this exposed site, and suffer as a result.
Throughout history, landscape designers have strived to re-create
the scenic effects of the natural world on the vastly reduced scale of
the garden. The most refined expression of this tradition took hold in
Japan and lives on in the work of most landscape architects today. The
designer establishes vantage points throughout the site and composes
views that both resemble and represent the natural world’s geography
and flora. Specific plants are chosen to suggest mountains, woodlands,
meadows, lakes, and streams. Their arrangement is intended to create a
feeling akin to being in a natural setting.
The Olympic Sculpture Park boasts a wide range of so-called
habitats. There is a valley surrounded by conifers that holds Richard
Serra’s Wake, a grove of quaking aspen where Tony Smith’s
sculptures are nestled, a trio of meadows of native wildflowers (one is
home to Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser), and an actual
shoreline along Elliott Bay. But Anderson’s impulse toward restoration
leaves us with a design that is literal rather than aesthetic,
pedagogical where it should be sensual, and—worst of
all—idealized instead of pragmatic. The tendency among
contemporary landscape architects to use native plants may be rooted in
sound principles of sustainability, but efforts to return sites to
their “natural” states by using such species often reflects a
sentimental romanticism and can lead, as it does here, to ill-conceived
and unappealing public spaces.
Anderson selects plants from specific environments to replicate
those environments in the park. The western larch is a deciduous
conifer that grows at high elevations in the Cascades, so he places it
on the highest, far-eastern edge of the space along Western Avenue. The
shore pine, frequently encountered along the coast, is planted along
the beach. These seem like appropriate choices until you consider their
overall function within the design. The group of pines he has stuck
into the sand could someday protect the tiny shoreline cove from
blistering winds, but the visitor who arrives there seeking sunshine or
views will instead find dark, towering conifers. For the larch, the
situation is worse. Planted behind the potentially much larger Douglas
firs, they will soon disappear behind them. Their bright orange needles
will be invisible to those strolling through the park in late fall when
they turn.
When traditional Japanese landscape designers wanted to create a
mountainous effect along the outer regions of their parks, they planted
pines. Not only were pines commonly seen in their mountains; they also
looked like mountains. They did not function simply as
specimens from the areas they were meant to represent; they possessed
physical properties that established a tangible sense of those areas.
Anderson has ignored the underlying visual principle. Plants are given
museum-style labels (complete with phonetic pronunciations of their
original Salish names), but not dynamic placement.
The dream of an authentically restored landscape precludes such
thinking, but the truth is that nonnatives might have succeeded better
at creating the intended effect. For a place that is all about rebirth,
there is plenty of death in evidence. In mid-August, rows of broadleaf
evergreen shrubs and groundcovers (salal, mahonia, kinnikinnick, and
huckleberry) had burned to a crispy brown. The stands of Douglas fir
and western red cedar were stressed and discolored; some had recently
been removed. The remaining leaves on the vine maples had dried up,
clinging to the branches in an advanced state of autumnal red, while
the Garry oaks were almost completely defoliated. Many of the plants
simply do not belong here. Quaking aspens, which make up the landscape
design’s most claustrophobia-inducing feature, are subject to a host of
diseases and do not perform well in Western Washington. The dogwood, an
understory or woodland edge tree, doesn’t thrive when subjected to
blasts of marine air.
But isn’t this a sculpture park, after all? If Anderson was
unwilling or unable to treat plants as visual, sculptural objects, then
perhaps he should have scrapped his concept and instead spent his time
establishing the plant textures and colors that at least are suited for
large sculptural backdrops. A real native habitat, like West Seattle’s
dense, old-growth preserve Schmitz Park, is no place for sculpture
anyway. 