Exhibition and Tours at the Center on Contemporary Art in
Seattle
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CLUI bus tour at Satsop abandoned nuclear power
plant in Washington State.
CLUI photo |
The CLUI was invited to create an
exhibit about Washington state for the Center on Contemporary
Art (CoCA), a nonprofit exhibition space near downtown Seattle.
The exhibit, which opened in June, 1999, was called "100 Places
in Washington," and was composed of 100 color photos and text
captions, prepared especially for this program by the CLUI.
In addition to the static display, a series of three guided
tours took place during the run of the exhibit, June 12 to July
31.
The exhibit was part of a larger
program, organized by CoCA, called "Land Use Action" (a title
which is a reference to the signs posted by law at all real
estate undergoing land use changes within the city of Seattle).
Numerous activities took place as part of CoCA's ambitious program,
including street interactions and a performance at a Nike Missile
site by Boston artist Marylin Arsem.
The CLUI tour program featured visits
to many of the sites represented in the exhibit of CLUI archive
photos, with tours arranged geographically and thematically.
The first tour was entitled "Land
Reuse Reaction," and visited sites where the land has undergone
several stages of uses and transformations. The tourbus traveled
around the southern edge of Puget Sound, first passing through
the Boeing nidus south of Seattle, then to the Johnson Gravel
Pit, where local briefer Helen Lessick met the group and described
the transformation of the site from abandoned quarry to land
art site, by the renowned artist Robert Morris, whom Lessick
worked with on the project.
Passing by the headquarters of the
Weyerhaueser Corporation (an extravaganza of corporate architecture
by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill resembling a wooden dam with
horizontal bands of glass), the group then picked up a representative
from the Port of Tacoma, for an interpretive drive-through of
the huge land area of the Port, a filled-in estuary, now developed
with a myriad of industrial forms, representing a good variety
of the industries that drive the State, including aluminum plants,
log yards, pulp mills, and Pacific Rim shipping.
After a stop at the Port's headquarters
and observation tower, the tour headed south again on Interstate
5 - that instrumental transportation corridor running down the
West Coast, from Canada to Mexico - past the military zones
of McChord Air Force Base and Fort Lewis, to the historical
microcosm of DuPont/Northwest Landing.
This site was the crux of the tour,
a dense program within a program. The site represents a kind
of land use stratigraphy of Washington State, juxtaposed in
a curious and suggestive fashion. First stop at the site was
at the small historical museum in the tiny town of DuPont, a
preserved grid of old corporate housing for the nearby and now
closed DuPont DeNemours Company plant. The director of the museum,
Lorraine Overmeyer, presented a historical summary of the town
and the region, which dates back to the "first white settlement
on Puget Sound," the Hudson's Bay Company post called Fort Nisqually,
established in 1833. Then, in 1906, the Dupont Company built
a major explosives plant on the site, producing dynamite and
bullets for the colonization and industrialization of the Pacific
Northwest.
In 1976 the plant closed, and the
property was bought by Weyerhaueser, which had hoped to open
a wood exporting terminal at the 800 acre plant site, located
on the Sound, south of Tacoma. Economics and environmental concerns
changed that plan, and now the company is building a "new urbanist"
community, called Northwest Landing, on the site, surrounding
the isolated old town of DuPont.
After Ms. Overmeyer's talk at the
Museum, the group boarded the bus again, and picked up representatives
of the Weyerhaueser Corporation at the Northwest Landing sales
office, then headed into the old plant site area, a restricted
zone where environmental cleanup from the plant continues. Past
piles of dirt covered by plastic sheets and old brick explosives
storehouses, the group stopped to ponder the past at the 1833
Fort Nisqually site, located in a clearing. Then it was on to
the future for a drive-through of the new development portion
of the site, Northwest Landing, narrated by Chris Hall, from
the sales office.
Designed by Berkeley architect Peter
Colthorpe, Northwest Landing already has over 100 houses, closely
packed and traditional in style, like a clean, nostalgic-feeling
community, manufactured in a completely new place. As with other
"new urbanist" projects, like Disney's Celebration, Florida,
the idea is to create a neighborly, pedestrian-oriented town,
where people can even walk to work. The corporate beltway surrounding
the town already has a big new Intel R&D plant, and the new
regional headquarters of State Farm Insurance. Although few
of the residents at Northwest Landing work at either place.
Once done with this contemporary
historical microcosm, it was back on the interstate, with a
brief sidetrip through the back lots of the State Capitol complex
at Olympia to see the power plant, and governors mansion. The
final stop was a land reuse site of an exceptionally unique
and gargantuan nature: the Satsop plant site, where one of the
largest nuclear power plant projects in the country never made
it to completion. Huge reactor buildings and abandoned security
turnstiles lie in the shadow of two five hundred foot tall cooling
towers, one of which is completely hollow and provides highly
unusual acoustics, as demonstrated by the director of the site,
Commissioner Tom Casey, who showed the group around. Mr Casey,
an antinuclear activist who opposed the construction of the
plant, is now charged with finding new uses for the site, where
billions of dollars were spent on what are now perhaps best
appreciated as abstract sculptural forms.
From there it was over two hours
back to Seattle, but on the way back, as with the rest of the
tour, a curated video program played on overhead monitors, showing
films about the sites being visited, passed by, or otherwise
related to the tour's theme, adding another dimension to the
experience.
Two other tours were conducted by
the CLUI as part of the Washington exhibit, including a full
day bus tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, considered
by some to be the "most contaminated place on earth," and a
boat tour up the industrialized Duwamish River, south of Seattle,
with around 100 people aboard the Seattle Rocket, the fastest
tourboat on Puget Sound.
