Architecture: Walk on the Wild Side

Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park occupies a sloping nine-acre site that reaches down to the water's edge along Elliott Bay. It has views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. It has wild grasses, quaking aspens and a salmon habitat on the shoreline. It has a fountain by Louise Bourgeois, an Alexander Calder, a couple of Mark di Suveros and one of Richard Serra's virtuoso exercises in rusted steel. It also has freight trains.

What I mean is, every half an hour or so, a clanging, whistling length of rolling stock rumbles through on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks that slice the park lengthwise along its shoreline side. And just up from those tracks, running parallel to them, the park is cut again by the four lanes of Elliott Avenue, one of Seattle's major arteries. Together they split the slope into three long stretches connected by a land bridge over the roadway and a steel span crossing the tracks. So this isn't just a park in the city. It's a park with the city in it.

Talk about the machine in the garden. Thoreau once famously complained that even in the woodland isolation of Walden Pond, there was no place he could escape the sound of the train whistle. Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, who designed the Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art Museum, have made their peace with that. "We thought the trains were amazing," says Weiss. "We wanted the park's pathways to slalom down and capture the energy of those trains." So the Z-shaped pathway that Weiss and Manfredi came up with is intended to praise the forces that shape Seattle, not to bury them. The team's $65 million park isn't just a respite from the city and its environs but a summation of them, an abbreviation for the place in all its aspects--its mountains and its woodlands but also its pipework and its concrete, its airport runways and its boxcars.

This is the direction that some of the most interesting new parks in the world are taking. In their search for usable parkland, densely developed cities in the U.S. and Europe are combing through their brownfields, disused and sometimes contaminated industrial sites. The Olympic Sculpture Park, for instance, is located on the former site of a fuel-storage and -transfer facility, which is why nearly all the original soil had to be dug out and carted away. And the City of New York is planning a huge and inventive new park atop Fresh Kills, the massive landfill--meaning garbage dump--on Staten Island where much of the debris from the Twin Towers was hauled after 9/11.

These are pretty challenging sites, but architects and landscape designers are treating them as opportunities to rethink what a park should look like and what it can say. Seattle was already a pioneer in this area by 1975, when the city opened its 20-acre Gas Works Park on the site of an abandoned plant that had once extracted gas from coal. Instead of tearing down the industrial buildings, the city refurbished and repurposed them as play barns and picnic sheds. But while the Gas Works Park includes a big rusted factory, the surrounding greenery doesn't much engage the thing, which stands more or less on its own on a grassy plain.