Landscape Information
This L-shaped, bilevel plaza wraps around the south and west sides of Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall, a six-story, semicircular curved-glass structure designed by LMN Architects in 1998. Built atop a parking structure and a Metro bus terminal, the half-acre Garden of Remembrance designed by landscape architect Robert Murase is a contemplative space dappled with sunlight and animated by cascading waterfalls, fountains, and pools. Local philanthropist Patsy Bullitt Collins intended that the plaza serve as both a civic and commemorative public landscape.
The centerpiece of Murase’s design is an approximately six-foot high granite wall, oriented westward to form a triangle with the two streets and engraved with the names of more than 8,000 Washington State veterans (from World War II into the 21century). Using abstract forms not intended to mimic nature, Murase’s Japanese-inspired design deploys slender, Minimalist reflecting pools as well as animating cascades that spill and splash, diminishing the sound of nearby vehicular traffic.
Visitors access the plaza by ascending a pair of staircases at the corner intersection, where cascading waterfalls bracket its northern edge and informally placed granite boulders and large horizontal slabs cascade downward to greet visitors. Additionally, universal access for all can be achieved from the northernmost point along Second Avenue, where a linear promenade navigates the grade change beneath a visually rich palette of native canopy and flowering trees, understory shrubs, perennials and groundcovers. A variety of seating opportunities, ranging from granite slabs to free standing benches, allow visitors to linger and contemplate, and individual granite seats march along the length of the universally accessible southern entrance route.
When Murase died in 2005, seven years after the garden’s opening, his wife noted that “this had become one of his favorite places.”
