Artist Andy Cao has scaled back his proposed design for the $745,000 Dexter Pit art park. Instead of a large, hollow egg shape that would focus on air space, the new design focuses on the ground-level space, he said.
The egg shape that visitors could enter was dropped from the plan because it was too expensive, Cao said, but one element of the original design has been retained: "Water droplets."
Under the new design, seven 3- to 12-foot-tall elongated water-droplet shapes with a blue LED light on top will rise out of the Class 4 wetland in an arrangement that looks from above like the Big Dipper.
Made of stainless-steel frames covered in blue, stainless-steel mesh, the art pieces will seem to be flowing upward as if gravity had been reversed on the land. "So the whole thing is very light and airy," Cao said.
Surrounded by environmentally critical steep slopes, the small wetland is in the middle of the site, and the art installation and a buffer zone around it will take up only 20 percent of the property, said Mark Brands, a landscape architect from Siteworkshop.
The plan also calls for a gently sloping, crushed-rock pathway that loops around the art installation and buffer. There will also be a small retaining wall, along with benches and a fence surrounding the buffer zone. "It will be a very transparent fence," he said of a barrier that will be made of cable or mesh to keep people out of the wetland.
The Seattle Department of Transportation owns tree-covered land at the entrance to the park along Dexter Avenue North, and the agecncy might suggest taking some trees out, Brands said. "That's their domain."
Another option under consideration is cutting off lower limbs to open up the site a bit, according to Patrick Donohue, the Seattle Parks and Recreation project manger for the art park. "You need to see in for safety issues," he explained.
Longtime citizen activist and Queen Anne Community Council member Sharon Levine had a number of objections to the plan, charging that the parks department had "ram-rodded" it through without enough public involvement.
For one thing, the public should have had a voice in choosing the art, and that the parks department should have a meeting at the site, she said. "I followed public policy," countered Donohue, who noted that the parks department normally doesn't hold public meetings at park sites. "You can do that on your own," he suggested.
But it was obvious that Levine had not checked out the park site, because she was worried about the project's impact on wildlife and ducks she said used the wetland pond.
In truth, there has not been any standing water in the wetland for several years, Brand noted. "We know the hydrology has shifted, but it would take two years of study to find out why."
Geotechnical engineers suspect landslide control on Queen Anne Hill may be a factor, he said. In any event, there's not much anyone can do to change that; it would be illegal to dredge the wetland to create a pond, Brand explained.
The Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs has to OK the design, and the parks department wants to send out bids for construction late this year of early next year, Donohue said.
The Board of Park Commissioners is expected to take a look at the plan in July, and there will also be a third public meeting after that for final comment, he said.
Levine complained that the third public meeting should be held before the park board meeting, and Donohue said he would look into it.
Assuming the plan is approved, work on the art park should be completed sometime next year, he said.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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