{"id":79968,"date":"2009-12-13T22:22:33","date_gmt":"2009-12-14T03:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"1577 at http:\/\/atlasobscura.com"},"modified":"2009-12-13T22:22:33","modified_gmt":"2009-12-14T03:22:33","slug":"neukom-vivarium-at-the-olympic-sculpture-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/79968","title":{"rendered":"Neukom Vivarium at the Olympic Sculpture Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seattle<\/a>, Washington<\/a> | Outsider Architecture<\/a><\/p>\n

Exploring the woods inevitably involves detritus – a broken branch decaying on the ground, leaves slowly turning to dust, pine cones gone to seed. Perhaps you’ve stumbled across a behemoth of a once-tree, felled by lightning or creeping, internal rot. <\/p>\n

In the Olympic Sculpture Park of Seattle, you’ll find sculptures by modern masters like Claes Oldenburg and Richard Serra, but you’ll also find another more unusual work of art: a rotting tree. It’s slowly rotting, in a controlled environment called the Nekoum Vivarium. (Vivarium means “a place of life” in Latin.) <\/p>\n

The tree in the sculpture park is not entirely sculpture nor nature, but is perhaps a mixture of both – natural decay under the careful gaze of the artist. This Western Hemlock lived its life in the Green River Watershed and was brought, with permission of the State, to the Olympic Sculpture Park in 2006. This vivarium was the vision of artist-cum-arborist Mark Dion. As he puts it:<\/p>\n

“In some ways, this project is an abomination. We\u2019re taking a tree that is an ecosystem\u2014a dead tree, but a living system\u2014and we are re-contextualizing it and taking it to another site. We\u2019re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin, a greenhouse we\u2019re building around it. And we\u2019re pumping it up with a life support system \u2014 an incredibly complex system of air, humidity, water, and soil enhancement \u2014 to keep it going. All those things are substituting what nature does\u2014emphasizing how, once that\u2019s gone, it\u2019s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system\u2014to take this tree and to build the next generation of forests on it. So this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system it\u2019s virtually impossible to get it back. In a sense we\u2019re building a failure.”<\/p>\n

The display includes magnifying glasses to examine the rot and a chalkboard for lessons on trees. The room is open whenever a volunteer staffer is there.<\/p>\n

The vivarium is in a 9-acre park on Seattle’s waterfront, adjacent to Myrtle Edwards Park.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seattle, Washington | Outsider Architecture Exploring the woods inevitably involves detritus – a broken branch decaying on the ground, leaves slowly turning to dust, pine cones gone to seed. Perhaps you’ve stumbled across a behemoth of a once-tree, felled by lightning or creeping, internal rot. In the Olympic Sculpture Park of Seattle, you’ll find sculptures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":435,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/435"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}