The Fountain

i think it’s funny that you’re not supposed to play in water…but that no one cares…when they built it, what the fuck did they think people would do, esp during the summer…stupid city…i love it…my daughter had a blast romping in it before Queer Pride last June

Was just last night in the last evening sunlight after a scrumptious dinner date with my spouse. I absolutely love it. It felt like the first, open, intelligent public space in Seattle. It made me think Seattle has not only become a city but has a chance at being fun, generous, amorous, sharp-witted and mentally capable of metaphor. LOVE LOVE LOVE the abstracted natural forms, the fibonacci sequences, the river/gutter, mountain/cone, rushing water in to placid pool. Awesome Awesome Awesome. I’m eager to learn more about the designer and see what has been written about this place. There are many similarities to be drawn to Freeway Park (30 years old this year) and there are also a number of distinctions. The surfaces here are generally smoothed toward abstraction, while the breton brut surfaces of Freeway Pary are all rough, bearing the imprints of their lost timber-form castings. In Freeway Park, natural resources from the region were cast in stone, mummified and re-animated with monsterous literalism. A forest turned to stone. At Cal Anderson, the fountain instead celebrates the formal Platonic source-codes from which nature itself is a synthetic product. This is how life operates in the mind and why this place fills me with fun and hope.

Also, and especially, I dig that the prohibitions, DON’T CLIMB ON THE FOUNTAIN, DON’T GO IN THE WATER, are printed on tiny little signs that the first time visitor, filled with joyous abandon, is likely to miss. I’m so happy to see this wink-wink speakeasy-like administrative technique institutionalized in a space nominally owned by the Seattle publis. It reeks of civilization, justice and again, hope.