That’s the way sculptor Richard Serra described Seattle’s coming waterfront sculpture park, speaking to Jen Graves last month.

Jen herself is waiting to see the completed project before she offers any expletives or superlatives of her own:

It’s not possible yet to assess the experience of being in the 8.5-acre park, or to say whether it will succeed where so many other sculpture parks have failed.

Myself — well, my only qualification for commenting is that a friend took me and a bunch of other people on a sunset tour of the park last week, but that being said, I do think “fucking magnificent” will come to be a common descriptor.

Here are some images from our tour of the park-in-progress, starting with Serra’s Wake, which was still awaiting its gravel bedding when I walked through. Below that are two reasons I love the park already — the view of Seattle it provides is dense and cosmopolitan, but reprioritized, with the retro nostalgia of the Space Needle shrunken down to appropriate size and a lot of room left over for imagining the city anew. Below that is an Aspen grove. And below that is Mark Dion’s Nurse Log (currently being nursed by a cocoon of green netting and mist-squirters, which made us all quite jealous).

(Photos by Summer Hayes)