Rainforest Gates
Jean Whitesavage and Nick Lyle
King Street Center
A hand-forged steel curtain wall celebrates nature in the Pacific Northwest.
Detailed ironwork adorns King Street Center’s public entrance, where massive curved gates and surrounding panels form a curtain wall. Created by artist team Jean Whitesavage and Nick Lyle, Rainforest Gates features sculpted imagery of Pacific Northwest plants and birds, joining together hundreds of pieces of forged steel. These natural elements celebrate the region’s intricate and beautiful ecosystem in all its glory.
The artwork includes two sets of bi-fold side gates, two large brackets, and an architectural eyebrow on the eighth floor. The brackets connect the curtain wall to the building’s super mullion structure, topped with a decorative band of deer fern. At the building’s cornice, the open steel frame is inset with forged alder leaves. The artists call their building parts “visual poetry” because, rather than merely imitating nature, they speak the language of living things through the medium of steel.Continue Reading ›
Based on Whidbey Island, WA, Whitesavage and Lyle create sculpture and architectural ironwork for buildings, gardens, parks and other public spaces, in addition to smaller interior pieces. They have completed more than 30 public art commissions since they began collaborating in 1991 and continue to work both together and independently.
About the Location
King Street Center
The streets of Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood are lined with brick and stone buildings that date back to the late 19th century, after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 burned nearly all of the wooden structures settlers had constructed since their arrival in the early 1850s. Featuring architectural details of the era’s Romanesque Revival,…
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