“At the northern end of a 1.5-mile park nearing completion—a transformation of Seattle’s downtown waterfront—a rounded structure clad in Alaskan yellow cedar has risen. Urbanistically, it is a hinge that gracefully shifts the park’s flat shoreline promenade to the Overlook Walk, a series of planted staircases and pedestrian ramps that ascend a 110-foot-high bluff to draw the park up to the city’s famous Pike Place Market.

“The Seattle Aquarium’s $170 million Ocean Pavilion, designed by LMN Architects, is not an object planted on this park but embedded in it. The steps of the Overlook Walk entwine the curving shoreline-facing wall of the Pavilion. The aquarium’s public terraced and planted roof opens vistas to Puget Sound (now increasingly referred to by the Indigenous name Salish Sea) as it seamlessly joins the walkway and continues to the Market. With Field Operations, landscape architect for the pavilion and the park, Muckleshoot-tribe plant expert Valerie Segrest has selected species that represent a metaphorical journey from the sea to the mountains.”
— James Russell

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