Best of Category

Olympic Sculpture Park

No other Environments entry compared with the grandeur and public-spiritedness of Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park. The nine-acre, $32-million expanse, commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum through a design competition in 2001, heals an urban wound. On a bay-front site formerly polluted by oil tanks, Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism created lawn planes full of metal sculptures alongside forests and salmon habitats. Through the greenery and artwork runs a Z-shaped, 2,200-foot-long path paved with crushed stone. As it meanders down a 40-foot rise from the shore, it directs visitors' gazes at the city skyline, the Puget Sound, or the Olympic Mountains. Footbridges and a glass-walled events pavilion allow peeks into the transit infrastructure below: Weiss/Manfredi slashed train tracks, an arterial avenue, and a parking garage through the park's steep landfill.

Critical reaction has been gushy. The New York Times praised the site's "shifting, subtly choreographed vistas," while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer named it "a gloriously rewarding intersection of art, architecture, urbanity and nature" as well as "an affirmation of civilization." I.D.'s jurors agreed. "It's seminal, one of the most significant pieces of architecture and landscape design of the past 25 years," Kroloff said. "It's thorough, thoughtful, and extraordinary, and it delivers on what it promised better than anyone expected."

Carpenter added that she was particularly amazed that the Z-shaped path from Weiss/Manfredi's original competition entry had not been compromised during the six-year realization process. "To have the original idea survive is just astounding," she said. Only Lignano was a little skeptical at first: "The folded landscape, the shifted broken planes-this type of architecture has been around, it's not innovative." But the other jurors fervently pressed their case, and he eventually conceded, "It's definitely very, very good."

All the jurors were a little discomfited, though, that so few other landscape designers had entered the competition. "It's weird to judge this alongside a cookie store," Kroloff said. Carpenter noted that the park "has no peers on this table. But it's such a beautiful piece of urban architecture that it might still have won even if it did have peers." By giving it a Best of Category prize, she said, "we hope to encourage more submissions on this scale."

Design Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism: Marion Weiss, Michael Manfredi, partners; Christopher Ballentine, project manager; Todd Hoehn, Yehre Suh, project architects; Patrick Armacost, Michael Blasberg, Emily Clanahan, Lauren Crahan, Beatrice Eleazar, Kian Goh, Hamilton Hadden, Mike Harshman, Mustapha Jundi, Justin Kwok, John Peek, Akari Takebayashi, designers
Client Seattle Art Museum
Materials Stabilized earth, corrugated stainless steel, aluminum curtain wall, mirror frit glass, precast concrete, wire mesh, gravel, sand, logs
Software 3-D AutoCAD, Rhino, Geopak, Eagle Point, Flowmaster, REF/DIF, STWAVE, Adobe Creative Suite