Western Washington University occupies a hillside campus overlooking Bellingham Bay, and a walk through it reveals one of the better outdoor sculpture collections in the Pacific Northwest. The Outdoor Sculpture Collection includes over 30 large-scale works installed across the campus grounds, with pieces by artists including Isamu Noguchi and Mark di Suvero. The collection was built deliberately and over decades, and the contrast between the abstract steel forms and the forested hillside is genuinely striking.
The university's architecture mixes mid-century modernism with newer academic buildings, and the campus is open to the public — there are no gates or restrictions. The Viking Union building has a good coffee shop and a bookstore. The campus connects directly to Sehome Hill Arboretum via trail, making a combined campus-and-arboretum walk a worthwhile half-day.
story: > The Noguchi piece on the central mall, "Sky Viewing Sculpture" (1969), is one of only a handful of Noguchi works on permanent public display in the Pacific Northwest. It was commissioned specifically for the site and oriented so that at the summer solstice, a shadow falls precisely across a concrete slab below.