Pike Place Market - 1907 - Responding to public outcry over the unreasonably high cost of food and farmer anger about low prices received from commission houses for their crops, the Seattle City Council, passed an ordinance establishing a public farmers' market on the west side of Pike Place. It quickly became a popular place for Seattle citizens to shop and save money on food. By 1909, the market averaged 64 farmers per day and 300,000 visitors per month.

Seattle Art Museum: Olympic Sculpture Park - 2007 - Envisioned as a new urban model for sculpture parks, this project is located on Seattle`s last undeveloped waterfront property – an industrial brownfield site sliced by train tracks and an arterial road. The design connects three separate sites with an uninterrupted Z-shaped green platform that descends forty feet from the city to the water, capitalizes on views of the skyline and Elliott Bay, and rises over existing infrastructure to reconnect the urban core to the revitalized waterfront. Formerly owned by Union Oil of California (Unocal), the site was previously used as an oil transfer facility. Before the park`s construction, over 120,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed. The remaining petroleum contaminated soil is capped by a new landform with over 200,000 cubic yards of clean fill, much of it excavated from the Seattle Art Museum`s downtown expansion project. Winner of an international design competition, the design for the Olympic Sculpture Park capitalizes on the forty-foot grade change from the top of the site to the water`s edge. Planned as a continuous landscape that wanders from the city to the shoreline, this Z-shaped hybrid landform provides a new pedestrian infrastructure. Built with a system of mechanically stabilized earth, the enhanced landform reestablishes the original topography of the site as it crosses the highway and train tracks and descends to meet the city. Layered over the existing site and infrastructure, the scheme creates a dynamic link that makes the waterfront accessible. The main pedestrian route begins at an 18,000-square-foot exhibition pavilion and descends as each leg of the path opens to radically different views. The first stretch crosses a highway, offering views of the Olympic Mountains; the second crosses the train tracks, offering views of the city and port; and the last descends to the water, revealing views of the newly created beach. This pedestrian landform allows free movement between the city`s urban center and the restored beaches on the waterfront. As the route descends from the pavilion to the water, it links three distinct settings: a dense and temperate evergreen forest; a deciduous forest of seasonally changing characteristics; and a shoreline garden including a series of new tidal terraces for salmon habitat and saltwater vegetation. Throughout the park, landforms and plantings collaborate to direct, collect, and cleanse storm water as it moves through the site before being discharged into Elliott Bay. As a “landscape for art,” the Olympic Sculpture Park defines a new experience for modern and contemporary art outside the museum walls. The topographically varied park provides diverse settings for sculpture of multiple scales. Deliberately open-ended, the design invites new interpretations of art and environmental engagement, reconnecting the fractured relationships of art, landscape, and urban life.

Seattle George Monument - 1989 - In a poetic attempt to consolidate concerns of assertion and assimilation, Seattle George Monument simultaneously portrays Chief Seattle (originally Chief Sealth) and George Washington. The monument's base is a trellis, an open cube with a grid functioning as a curtain wall and a gazebo. A tripod supports a cone torso and the monument's head, twenty-four aluminum profiles of Chief Seattle fanned out to create an armature for English Ivy growing out of a Boeing 707 nose cone planter. A sharpened template will act as a wind vane, trimming the ivy overgrowth into a 360- degree evergreen bust of George. Eventually, as the vines cover the head, Chief Seattle will become a memory. The indigenous culture is figuratively a foundation upon which the present is an overlay. The cone and tripod suggest an inverted lodge, and at the same time refer to George Washington's work as a surveyor, with the cone becoming his plumb bob. The silhouettes were appropriated from their namesakes on the city and state logos. The use of the term "monument" in this piece is a reference to the subtle survey markings as much as it is to monumental sculpture. Sandblasted into the plaza adjacent to the monument are references to two historical events in 1855. On the north/south axis is a reproduction of the first survey map connecting Seattle to the national rectilinear survey grid. This system facilitated the establishment of land ownership disregarding land forms and natural boundaries. The survey team embarked on the survey shortly after the signing of the treaty of 1855. Chief Sealth was one of the cosigners of the treaty. On the east/west axis is a sandblasted portion of Chief Sealth's famous speech given at the time of the signing. The text is in Lushootseed, the written language of the Salish. The gazebo is aligned parallel with the north/south Willamette Prime Meridian, although the adjacent built environment is askew. The interface of the vines growing on the grid of the gazebo suggests reconciliation of the surveyed grid with the landscape. As a monument to man's manipulation of Nature, the sculpture in itself attempts the same. The impending topiary shearing of George Washington's bust is not assured. Failure to manipulate the English Ivy does not prevent this piece's success. Nature inevitably does not do what we plan or predict. The topiary realization of George's head is only a transition or a fluke in an artificially sustained sylvan landscape atop Interstate 5. A mechanical watering system meters out water like clockwork onto the sculpture and the adjacent landscape. If this man-made landscape is interrupted by disease, neglect, or change of aesthetic sensibility, the armature, Chief Seattle, will be re-revealed, reaffirming Chief Sealth's quote: At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still Love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people for the dead are not powerless. Dead did I say? There is no death. Only the change of worlds.

Seattle Center Totem - 1970 - The Seattle Center Totem is a 30-foot-high pole carved in the Pacific Northwest coast Indian tradition. It features from top to bottom Hawk, Bear (holding a salmon), Raven and Killer Whale. Traces of the original bright red and black paint are still visible but undeniably faded. The once well-defined designs of the hand-carved wood have been smoothed by years of wind, rain and sun. This natural weathering is not meant to be viewed as an indication of neglect but rather as a sign of respect in accordance with Native American tradition that totems be left to age gracefully.

Seattle Public Library - 2004 - The Seattle Central Library is the flagship library of the Seattle Public Library system. The 11-story glass and steel building in downtown Seattle, Washington was opened to the public on May 23, 2004. Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA/LMN were the principal architects, and Magnusson Klemencic Associates was the structural engineer with Arup. Arup also provided mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering, as well as fire/life safety, security, IT and communications, and audio visual consulting. Hoffman Construction Company of Portland, Oregon, was the general contractor. The 362,987 square feet public library has the capacity to hold about one and a half million books and other materials. It offers underground public parking for 143 vehicles and over 400 computers accessible to the public. Over two million people visited the library during its first year. It is the third Seattle Central Library building to be located on the same site at 1000 Fourth Avenue, the block bounded by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Madison and Spring Streets. The library has a unique, striking appearance, consisting of several discrete "floating platforms" seemingly wrapped in a large steel net around glass skin. Architectural tours of the building began in June 2004. In 2007, the building was voted #108 on the American Institute of Architects' list of Americans' 150 favorite structures in the U.S. It was one of two places in Seattle to be included on the list of 150 structures, the other being T-Mobile Park.

Seattle Art Museum - 1933 - The Seattle Art Museum is one of the foremost cultural institutions in the Pacific Northwest. A significant increase in the museum`s holdings and a visionary public-private partnership were the catalysts for the construction of a new 16-story building. The 450,000sf expansion and renovation project allows SAM to grow incrementally, converting lease space to new exhibition galleries over a period of 20 years. The new building sits on First Avenue overlooking Elliott Bay. It is primarily a western prospect, with views extending to the Olympic Range. Four exterior “shells” form the boundary of the building and site, each responding to a particular orientation. Their surfaces of flush glass, fixed and operable stainless steel panels engage varied light – filtering, reflecting, and diffusing it into the exhibition spaces. At the street, the museum is open and transparent, providing glimpses into the galleries from the sidewalk below. Rising through the lobby, the exhibition spaces are defined by parallel structural walls that filter light and provide views deep into the center of the block. These walls create rooms of varied proportion and height, providing a broad spatial palette for the curators and the collection. The museum is ordered by an internal landscape of double-height galleries that intersect exhibition floors above, drawing the eye further up into the heart of the museum. The expansion is an open field for vertical growth, both lens and filter for a shifting series of relationships with art and landscape.

Seattle Cloud Cover - 2006 - Fernández’s glass bridge invites viewers to take cover and to look down to the railroad below through images of changing skies. In Fernández’s saturated color photographs, sandwiched in glass, and in the relationship of the bridge to its setting, one recognizes how images of nature influence the way we perceive it.