Et in Arcadia Ego

Located on an outcrop of land at the north end of Lake Union, Gasworks Park is famous for stunning views across the lake to downtown, pleasant grassy slopes, and an excellent kite-flying hill. Oh yes, and on one side, an ancient rusting retired gasworks.

The controversy over whether this area should become industrial heartland for the city or a green park and viewpoint began in 1903. But the Seattle Gas Light Company had already begun buying plots of land, and would not be dissuaded. The gasworks produced gas first from coal, and then, from 1937 onwards, from oil. The plant was in operation from 1906 until 1956, when Seattle converted to natural gas.

In 1962 the City of Seattle began purchasing the abandoned gasworks, rejecting development proposals in favor of creating a park. Richard Haag, who was hired as designer, was eager to preserve the ruins of the gasworks for their "historic, esthetic and utilitarian value."

I'm not convinced that this strange, fenced-off sculptural presence is utilitarian exactly, but in terms of historic preservation I think Haag made the right call. Of 1,400 gasworks that were once in operation in the United States, this is the only one still intact. Grimly rusty, it's both a monument to industrial progress and a cautionary tale of environmental ignorance: before the park could be opened to the public, extensive bioremediation was required to deal with the contaminated soil, groundwater and lake sediment.

And when it comes to aesthetics, I find myself again agreeing, because I'm intrigued by Haag's challenge to the conventional beauty of urban park spaces. When it was opened in 1973, Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times that "The complex array of towers, tanks and pipes of the gasworks forms a powerful industrial still life." If it is an industrial still life, it's one descended rather from the muckraker honesty of Thomas Anshutz or the Ash Can School than the soaring homages to progress of Modernist artists.

In Edmund Spencer's The Shepheardes Calendar, published in 1579, the pastoral idyll is powerful rather than cloying precisely because it is always being threatened. And a common trope of pastoral art is the memento mori, as in Nicolas Poussin's painting Et in Arcadia Ego.
Perhaps the unlikely aesthetic appeal of the rusting industrial hulk at Gasworks taps into this unease, the power of the skull in the pastoralist's Arcadian landscape.