Derek Bruno and Gage Hamilton’s publicly-sited artwork along Pike and Pine streets brings a unified visual identity to the corridor, integrating art into city infrastructure. Photo credit: City of Seattle

Connecting the waterfront to downtown has been one of the goals of the transformative Waterfront Seattle program. With improvements in east-west pedestrian connections such as the Marion Street Pedestrian Bridge, the Union Street Pedestrian Bridge, the Pioneer Square East West Pedestrian Improvements and the breathtaking Overlook Walk, accessing the new Waterfront Park has become not only easier but also improved in terms of experience – with thoughtfully designed infrastructure, improved lighting and art and cultural additions.

The latest among these east-west connections to be completed is the Pike Pine Streetscape and Bicycle Improvements Project that integrates art into key infrastructure components. Artists Derek Bruno and Gage Hamilton, worked with the project’s design team to unify the corridor with reoccurring artistic surface treatments.

Titled Sound to Summit, the artwork uses a morphing wave form as the basis of a figurative device that appears along the corridor. This repeated imagery provides cohesiveness to the Pike and Pine Street couplet (each street is one way in opposing directions). Designed by the artists and implemented by the general contractor as part of project construction, the artwork enlivens functional streetscape structures.

Sound to Summit: Buffer Stamps is probably the most subtle of the interventions. Stamped into concrete bike buffers, the wave form starts as the top half of gently rounded “sine” waves towards the west ends of Pike and Pine Streets, closer to the waterfront. The shape gradually becomes more angular (“Tri-wave”) as one approaches Capitol Hill to the east. Thus, closer to the Sound, the wave resembles water; towards Summit Avenue, the wave becomes a triangular peak of a hill or a mountain. The design reflects the geography and topography of the city.

Placed on the buffers on Pike and Pine streets are custom cast concrete planters, Sound to Summit: Planters. These planters protect bicyclists as well as provide respite from the urban hardscape with diverse plant material. The wave design appears on different faces of the rectangular planters, with each side showing a different iteration of the wave. Rendered in relief of different depths, the designs are accentuated by light and shadow and punctuate the corridor.

The most striking rendition of the wave pattern appears on the custom railings on the Pike and Pine Street overpasses over I-5. Across the bridges, not only does the wave undergo transformation from west to east, and vice versa, but the color shifts from blue at the ends closer to the water, to green at Capitol Hill. Panels of cut-steel pickets set at an angle form a lenticular representation of the wave pattern in Sound to Summit: Bridge Railing. As one travels along the railing, the permeability of the view through the railing shifts, depending on one’s relationship to the pickets. A total of 79 panels across both streets display one of three patterns – labeled sine-wave, mid-wave and tri-wave – sequentially.

Whether rendered in shallow depth of relief or in cutouts, Sound to Summit’s consistent patterns across various surfaces of the renewed Pike and Pine Street corridors create a unified identity through the retail core both to and from the waterfront.

This project is funded with Central Waterfront 1% for Art funds, administered by the Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects and the Office of Arts & Culture.

About the Artists

Christopher Derek Bruno

Born and raised in Atlanta, GA, Bruno received a BFA in Furniture Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In the years immediately following, he worked in Portland OR + Brooklyn NY for creative agencies and independent furniture companies with the goal of creating sustainable objects. A cross-country move to Seattle WA in 2008 brought with it a shift in focus + practice from the design field to the fine arts. For the past twelve years, Bruno has explored the nature of perception and the cognitive visual experience. His work investigates what occurs between a source of visual stimuli and the mind: how sensory input becomes spatial awareness. This inquiry is driven by the belief that understanding visual perception may offer insight into broader principles that shape the human experience; evidence of his efforts serve as meditations on beauty / invitations to intentional states of perception / elevations of fundamental concepts as forces capable of shifting perception / dissolving fear / deepening our engagement with this life.
On his best days, Bruno can be found testing recipes for scratch-made pancakes in Happy Valley OR, where he lives with his wife /Megan/ + 2.5 year old child /Luca/ + pups /Honey + Oso

Gage Hamilton

Gage Hamilton is a Seattle-based artist and curator originally from Portland, Oregon. He founded the nonprofit Forest For The Trees in 2013, producing over 100 public murals by international artists and later leading Seattle’s SODO Track, a 2-mile mural corridor recognized nationally. His curatorial work connects art with community, while his personal work often explores the lack thereof. He also founded Tips On Failing, a community art space in Portland. Since 2022, he’s relaunched Forest For The Trees as an annual Seattle arts festival and currently curates exhibitions with ARTXIV, Populus Hotel, RailSpur Studios, Europa and Common Ground, helping revitalize the city’s Pioneer Square neighborhood through public art and cultural programming.

This is a blog post from the Seattle Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects.

Arts and culture play a central role on the waterfront. Responding to the history of the site, its ecology, economy and communities, publicly-sited art commissions help to create a sense of place that invite residents and visitors alike to visit the waterfront. Learn more about art in the Waterfront’s vision.

There are 9 publicly-sited artworks planned for the waterfront. Read our other posts about the completed pieces.