↗ Olympic Sculpture Park 空中俯視
又一件結合建築、地景、藝術的大型設計案跟世人見面了！
由來自紐約市的建築師 Michael Manfredi 與 Marion Weiss (Weiss/Manfredi 事務所)設計的 Olympic Sculpture Park (西雅圖雕塑公園)屬於 Seattle Art Museum 的一部份)於 2007年1月20日舉行盛大的開幕典禮，從2001 年的競圖，經過七年的規劃、設計、到施工，終於要對大眾開放。
西雅圖時報網站為該公園製作了一個奧林匹克雕塑公園導覽網頁，內容相當豐富，建議可以點選閱讀。
A park is born
本文來自西雅圖時報
Michael Manfredi designed 26 slightly different door handles for the front entrance of the Olympic Sculpture Park pavilion before he settled on the perfect look, the right feel.
In his mind, the handles had to do more than just open the doors: They needed to complement the basic structure of the building and its relationship to the park as a whole. "Michael obsessed about this," his partner Marion Weiss said on a recent visit to Seattle.
The New York architectural team was here to run through a long list of last-minute construction fixes before Seattle Art Museum's new park opens Jan. 20, from tweaks to interior lighting to adjusting the flow of water off the roof in a rainstorm. They couldn't have picked a better time to check how the park holds up under heavy weather. We met there on the afternoon of Dec. 14 — the day of one of the most destructive storms in the region's history.
Weiss got our interview off to an unusual start by inviting me to the women's restroom with her to see how it is detailed. There was no doubt while talking to the pair — who are married as well as being work partners — that they are both super-involved in every inch of the 9-acre park. They integrated all aspects of their design: the tables and chairs for the café, custom fixtures to light the pathways, the pleated stainless-steel shell of the pavilion and the shifting folds of the concrete boundary walls, a gentle reminder of the plate tectonics under the earthquake prone area — and another echo of the park's zigzag shape.
The sculpture park's scope
While Weiss and Manfredi have their eyes on the details, they're fully aware of the sweeping impact of their project: The Olympic Sculpture Park is poised to dramatically alter Seattle and the international art scene.
"It's what you dream of as an architect," Weiss said. "A project that in some way changes the way people engage the city, the way they engage nature, the way they engage art."
Long before construction was complete, Weiss/Manfredi's design for the Olympic Sculpture Park began catching the interest of big-city planners and administrators in the U.S. and abroad. It reconnects downtown to the waterfront, setting a model for cities around the world. "New York has its eye on [the project]," Weiss said. "We're speaking about it at the Louvre in Paris in the spring, and in South America. It's capturing international attention."
Weiss/Manfredi won Seattle Art Museum's design competition in 2001 from a field of contestants that included architectural heavyweights Richard Meier (Manfredi's former employer) and Rem Koolhaas. Their plan was chosen for a exhibition called "Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape" that debuted in 2005 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show featured designs for 22 outstanding international projects and later traveled to Germany.
A site made for wandering
The site Weiss/Manfredi was handed came with lots of pluses. It borders a rare slice of downtown waterfront. The views are spectacular, with a 180-degree sweep of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. It sits at the edge of downtown with its jutting skyline. There is the constant display of shifting Seattle light and dramatic sunsets over the water. All that was obvious.
But it took a while before the architects got the full impact of the location. "There are great views of the Olympics, but when you make the first turn on the z-shaped route, and there for the first time, clear as a bell, is Mount Rainier!" Manfredi said. "It was almost as if it were some biblical siting."
On the other hand, the park's location posed some daunting challenges. "It's not a waterfront property; it's three waterfront properties," Weiss said. Between those plots of land run a major arterial street with high-clearance requirements and a set of working railroad tracks — plus some of the former industrial property was contaminated. The basic problems Weiss and Manfredi set out to solve were: How do you make a park in a place with trains and heavy traffic rushing through it? How do you build a bridge between the city and the waterfront? The way the architects addressed those questions and reclaimed a precious strip of beach has obvious implications for the rest of Seattle's waterfront — and the embattled viaduct.
"Most people would say cover the whole thing up: one big concrete platform with landscape on it," Weiss said. "Wouldn't that be the right solution? You can see why that would be a temptation. Somebody else would say let's have three parks, with a couple of artists doing a couple bridges: Wouldn't that be fabulous?"
"The danger with that" Manfredi said, "is you still would have three small parcels. It would have felt small. The other extreme is cover it over, but then you lose the potential of roads and train tracks. Even though they appear to be a negative, they are also what makes the site so dynamic.
"One of the things we try in our work is to look at each site in terms of its own character, its own unique qualities. There's the wonderful capacity to see trains; you wouldn't want to erase that. So how do you do a park, a setting for sculpture, for art, that effectively wanders from the city to the water's edge? We started thinking of the idea of wandering, that was a bit of an epiphany. That suggests a much more relaxed route, a slow route. Once you think of the park as wandering, that opened a set of possibilities for us."
A one-of-a-kind opportunity
Manfredi said that in all their research, they could not find another sculpture park like this. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, though similar in some respects, doesn't link three sites or encompass the topographic variation, the beach or the dramatic views that Seattle's park does. The basic models are the contained city sculpture garden, like the one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or rambling rural sculpture parks such as Storm King in upstate New York or the Kröller Müller museum in Holland. "There you get in the car and drive 50 miles to some beautiful setting, but you really have to be a lover of art to do that." On top of that, at many sculpture parks, you pay a hefty admission fee.
That's not the case in Seattle, with the convenience of an urban location and the amenities of the countryside. "Here was an opportunity — and a credit to the museum — where they said this park is going to be free and we want it to be open, so there was no model to fall back on. That caused a lot of anxiety, but in a way it was really liberating. It was so energizing to think fresh."
From a bar to a park
Their final breakthrough in conceptualizing the park came while hashing out the design problems at a favorite New York bar, the Odeon. "This took a couple margaritas, actually," Manfredi laughed. Fiddling with one of their business cards, Weiss tore a zigzag shape with a fold at the top right. "It's really this, isn't it?" she said.
That simple gesture is the core of their winning design. Yet, making it happen has taken years of hard work and setbacks, frustrating for everybody involved, Manfredi said. "There have been so many hurdles thrown at the project [Remember the viaduct? The trolley barn? The cement strike?] that those of us who were working on it really had to band together."
Now that the park is nearly complete, they hope appreciating it will be easy.
"We firmly believe architectural design is driven by an intellectual idea, but in the end you have to understand it on a very viceral level," Manfredi said. "Someday some guy driving a truck at Elliott and Broad will look at Mark Dion's [Vivarium] and say, 'I wonder what that is — it looks sort of interesting.' If that happens, we will have done our job."
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::Site Specific: The Work of Weiss/Manfredi Architects::