Growing Hing Hay Park

Project Title: Growing Hing Hay Park
Landscape Architect: MIG, Inc. and Turnscape
Category: General Design - Public Ownership
Location: Seattle, WA
Description:
Simultaneously intricate and expansive, Growing Hing Hay Park reveals the power of small public spaces to build bridges among generations, ethnicities, and user groups in neighborhoods facing unprecedented development pressure. Gracefully connecting to an original timeworn park, landscape architects transformed the space into a vital community hub bursting with new life in the form of strong lines, plantings, people, and programming. The park’s iconic gateway, inspired by Asian paper cutting and folding traditions, serves as a beacon, welcoming visitors to the park from the regional transit center and destination Asian grocery just blocks away. A carefully crafted sequence of seat walls and planting beds recalls the terraced farming traditions of eastern Asia and gracefully connects all users to the older portion of the park along a universally accessible, meandering path. Red platforms span the terraced spaces with playful, cut-metal representations of traditional flora and fauna. Unmistakably drawing from the well-spring of Asian forms, motifs, and sensibilities, Hing Hay Park is proudly contemporary, strengthening the legacy of a neighborhood with a place where all can gather.

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