'Nine Spaces, Nine Trees' by Robert Irwin

1983, relocated and redesigned 2006.

They called it jail for trees. It was a grid of nine flowering plum trees, three to a side, each one enclosed in blue chain-link fencing, on the top of a parking garage at the Public Safety Building in downtown Seattle. It was a work of art, not well liked.

Robert Irwin is an artist and the subject of Lawrence Weschler's classic 1982 book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. It was in 1982 that Irwin designed Nine Spaces, Nine Trees for the cold, dark, northern-facing courtyard at Seattle's Public Safety Building, where the sun-starved trees stayed anemic and lonely. The nearby sheriff's office had requested that the fencing be transparent enough not to shelter escapees. The chain-link fence was of the no-climb variety, which sounds depressing.

Few people mourned the removal of Nine Spaces, Nine Trees when the Public Safety Building was demolished in 2005. It wouldn't fit anywhere else on city land, and many of its actual parts were destroyed with the building, so the state's public-art program assumed ownership of the design. The University of Washington offered a spot for a new version, next to the giant George Washington on the lawn in front of the brick Odegaard Undergraduate Library.