The biggest hit of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair? According to then-New York Times art critic John Canaday, it wasn’t the Space Needle. Nor was it the Monorail, brand-new at the time, which barreled millions of visitors to Seattle Center at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. To Canaday, it was the fair’s United States Science Pavilion, a “dreamlike building before which people stand murmuring, ‘beautiful,’ ” he wrote.
The pavilion was designed by Seattle-born architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1968), who designed the World Trade Center in New York City around the same time as the World’s Fair. For the Science Center, he created a cluster of concrete buildings encircling a courtyard with two large reflecting pools and walkways topped with a quintet of 100-foot-tall, gothic-like decorative “space arches.” The quad was to be a place for reflection, a cloistered oasis away from the hubbub of the fair.
In the fall of 1962, after the Fair closed, the Seattle landmark building became home to the Pacific Science Center, a nonprofit science museum located on the southern edge of the Seattle Center grounds.
Sixty years on, the Pacific Science Center has announced plans to transform the courtyard into an “urban ecosystem” that integrates water, plants and animals. This could mean anything from a standard renovation to siting planters in the iconic pools to transforming the pools into a meadow filled with native plants and a “rainwater garden” to attract pollinators, songbirds and butterflies.