When the Olympic Sculpture Park first opened (visit the site to see SAM’s Flash tour), The Seattle Times noted one of Mayor Greg Nickels’s comments on its relation to Chicago’s Millenium Park. Then, two weeks ago, Senior Editor of Arts, Architecture and Culture at Chicago Public Radio (and blogger) Edward Lifson called the OSP “Son of Chicago’s Millennium Park” and suggested that no work in it is greater than MP’s Cloud Gate.
Indeed, many Chicagoans love Cloud Gate. Google-image the term, and you will be met with a flood of personal moments between Millennium Park visitors and “the bean”, as it is more commonly referred to, taken from every angle imaginable.
However, initially when professional photographers and journalists were suspected of photographing the piece, they were forbidden, due to what they were told was the artist’s copyright. Generating fierce public outcry far louder than recent concerns surrounding Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, thanks to the Chicago Reader’s Ben Joravsky (see commentary and link in New (sub)Urbanism), the true reason behind the restriction eventually surfaced: the city of Chicago owned exclusive licensing rights for selling images of Millennium Park.
When I visited the Typewriter Eraser, Scale X this weekend, the note on photography had been politely censored with a piece of silver masking tape.
Regardless of whether Cloud Gate is truly the superior sculpture, I have to say that visiting the Olympic Sculpture Park feels far better than visiting Millennium Park. Perhaps it is symbolic, in the OSP’s roots of cleaning up a wasteland and recreating a salmon habitat. Or because of the organic elements of grass, a gravel path, and one of Seattle’s few downtown beaches, in comparison to the MP’s concrete center and odd juxtapositions of roman columns in front of Gehry’s Jay Pitzer Pavilion. While I will not determine whether one park is definitively better than the other, I know that I will return to the Olympic Sculpture Park to see what it turns into, whereas I left Millennium Park feeling like one visit was enough.
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