Seattle Art Museum: Olympic Sculpture Park

Olympic Sculpture Park is the winning design of an international competition by WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism. Envisioned as a new model for an urban sculpture park, the project is located on a industrial site at the water’s edge in Seattle, Washington. The design creates a continuous constructed landscape for art, forms an uninterrupted Z-shaped “green” platform, and descends 40 feet from the city to the water, capitalizing on views of the skyline and Elliot Bay and rising over the existing infrastructure to reconnect the urban core to the revitalized waterfront. An exhibition pavilion provides space for art, performances and educational programming. From this pavilion, the pedestrian route descends to the water, linking three new archetypal landscapes of the northwest: a dense temperate evergreen forest, a deciduous forest and a shoreline garden. The design not only brings sculpture outside of the museum walls but brings the park itself into the landscape of the city.