HADDAD | DRUGAN

Emerald City is the primary art component resulting from the Sea-Tac Airport North Entry Art Plan by Haddad|Drugan. Emerald City will be integrated into the landscape along the roadway and future light rail line at the main entry into the Airport. The art includes elements marking the entry into as well as the exit out of the Airport.  The piece is a dichotomous threshold tying into the paradoxical Wizard-of-Oz dream of wanting to leave and wanting to go home.

In the southbound/entry direction the art appeals to the sense of wonder and possibility associated with travel.  Lit towers and planted terraces on the embankment west of the roadway portray a utopian city, a fantastic abstraction of an idealized place.  In the median, undulating planted berms formed by wave-like retaining walls abut the west edge of the new light rail line.  Their forms represent the mountains and water surrounding the “Emerald City,” and their spatial sequence emulates a quality of flight.  One linear undulating berm culminates in a new clock tower at the center of the future Loop Road.  The towers and walls will be dramatically up-lit.

Art viewed in the northbound/exit direction occurs right before the highway opens into a wide view of the Cascade Mountains, thus marking entry to the Pacific Northwest.  The art is an earthwork of stacked gabions filled with native rock alternating between light granite and dark basalt, and planted with evergreen groundcovers.  The tips of the gabion walls are illuminated.  The art will convey a hyper-real accentuation of the Pacific Northwest natural environment.

“Emerald offers us rarity and sparkle… A green city provides an ideal reflection of nature; a city not in opposition to the forest, but a humanized version of it.  It is the city as a dazzling garden, a dream of nature perfected.”- The Emerald City by Daniel Willis