Drawn to water

Seattle’s Westlake Avenue cuts diagonally across the downtown traffic grid, a series of oddly angled intersections and large, unused triangles of asphalt.

The 90-foot-wide thoroughfare passes through a barren forest of tall buildings, squat 1970s structures and car dealerships. It is a sterile gray roadway in a city known for its expansive green space.

Lorna Pauley Jordan envisions something different.

She sees water. Water cascading, flowing, nourishing gardens. Drawing people from one pocket park to the next like the fountains of Rome.

“People love to follow water,” the 1976 University of Virginia graduate says. “The flow, the reflection. We have a natural affinity to it.”

Jordan is part artist, part architect and part engineer. Her work on the Westlake Gardens plan is just the latest in a series of designs that skillfully blend water, people, wildlife and artistic vision.

She calls herself an environmental artist and specializes in designing with water. It’s a far cry from her bachelor’s degree in history.

“I tended to take classes in everything, from ecology to urban planning, art history and literature. It was a broad-based kind of program,” she said. “What really interested me was the place in-between disciplines.”

After she graduated, Jordan left Virginia for the Pacific Northwest, a place she’d always admired. She spent two years taking art, music and sculpture classes at Seattle’s University of Washington.

She spent years creating large art installations for Northwest museums before joining the design team for a water reclamation plant in Renton, Wash., southeast of Seattle. That’s where she discovered what she calls “the poetics of water.”

“Water is a huge sculptor,” she said. “When you’re in a plane flying over the landscape, you can see how water has sculpted the world’s surface. It’s always moving, changing form and shape.”

At Waterworks Gardens in Renton, water flows through a series of ponds and streams, natural filters that remove pollution and prepare it for use in a nearby wetland. Jordan designed five outdoor rooms, pathways, ponds and waterways that convey a story about the filtering power of plants.

Her work at the reclamation plant led to other water-based projects. Lorna Jordan Studios led the design team for a series of outdoor rooms, pavilions and bridges at a five-acre park in conjunction with a West Seattle creek restoration project. She also is designing projects that connect people to water and the environment within the Indian Bend Wash in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Ventura Harbor Wetlands in Ventura, Calif.

Jordan is excited about the downtown Seattle plan, which still needs political and financial support. The path of Westlake Avenue roughly describes the flow of an ancient stream that once emptied into Lake Union. Jordan would make reference to that creek, using both buildings and landscape to develop the street as an urban watershed.Her plan includes lining the street with trees and building small, unique parks at intersections. Water would flow through and be treated by ponds, fountains and streams, cascading down building walls and attracting visitors. Each park would be different, she said, some acting as community gardens and some as children’s play areas or urban cafes.

“I was trying to make art out of these things that happen with water,” she said. “I hope to draw people to the streets and draw them from place to place with the water.”