Seattle's Best (and Worst)

The first time I saw Seattle, in the late '80s, I was not impressed. True, the natural setting was exceptionally beautiful. Like San Francisco, the city was laid out on steep hills, the streets led down to a waterfront, and there was the bonus of the snow-capped Olympic Mountains in the distance. But the downtown architecture—and what else does a short-stay visitor see?—was a generic mixture of modernist high-rises and unremarkable older office blocks. The two newest skyscrapers were the Bank of America Tower (Chester L. Lindsey Architects), whose black-glass form looked forbidding in the pale Pacific Northwest light, and the Washington Mutual Tower, a Classical-lite by Kohn Pedersen Fox in their full-bore Postmodern mode. On the whole, I had the impression that if there was such a thing as a local sense of architectural style, Seattle had not yet found it.
Image of downtown with Mt. Rainier in the background courtesy Wikipedia.org.
Not that Seattle hadn't tried. The city was founded in 1852, and only 50 years later the Olmsted firm was brought in from Boston to lay out an ambitious park system, an arboretum, and (later) the University of Washington. In the 1920s, New York architect George B. Post built the grand Olympic Hotel. However, most of the downtown buildings were the work of competent but unexceptional local practitioners. The 1962 World's Fair brought Seattle national attention—and the Space Needle, which became the city's icon. The U.S. Pavilion at the fair was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the first Seattle-born architect to achieve widespread recognition (the following year, he began work on New York's World Trade Center and appeared on the cover of Time). Yamasaki developed a quirky personal style that has been described as "cyber-Gothic." His chief contribution to downtown Seattle is the bizarre Rainier Bank Tower (1979), which, elevated on an eight-story-high, flared, windowless base, resembles a giant hi-fi speaker.
Image courtesy Unico.
Today, as home to global corporations such as Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, McCaw, and Starbucks, the city is in the midst of what the Seattle Times has called the Age of Philanthropy. In 1996, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen commissioned Frank Gehry to build the Experience Music Project, a museum devoted to popular music. Neither the program nor the building is a success. The visual display of music has proved a slippery conceit—how many record jackets and vintage guitars can you look at?—and Gehry's roiling composition of multicolored forms, meant to recall a shattered Fender Stratocaster, according to the architect, is shallow and unconvincing. Benaroya Hall (designed by Seattle-based LMN Architects), home of the Seattle Symphony, is functionally successful—the hall is said to have admirable acoustics, and the building fits snugly into its downtown surroundings. But the exterior is an uninspired mix of architectural clichés; it could be anywhere.
Image courtesy Experience Music Project, Seattle.
Yet there are recent signs that Seattle is finding its architectural feet. At first glance the three-year-old central library, designed by Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, looks like one of Daniel Libeskind's crystalline compositions, with trendy exaggerated cantilevers and weird sloping planes. But while Libeskind's architecture strikes me as whimsical, the Seattle building appears purposeful and determined. It is also—as this view shows—oddly respectful of its surroundings. Not that it tries to fit in. Civic monuments used to stand out by virtue of their extra adornment (think New York's Public Library). In a downtown dominated by slick office towers, the Seattle library is conspicuous for its lack of refinement.
Image courtesy the author.
The interior of the library resembles a lofty greenhouse. It is not immediately clear that this is an ideal environment for reading—I prefer something a little cozier myself—but the feeling of space creates an exhilarating public room, and Seattle—a famously overcast city—is one place where having a lot of glass makes sense.
Image courtesy the author.
What is most striking about the interior is the roughness, almost crudeness, of the décor. Pipes and ducts hang from the ceiling of the so-called Mixing Chamber, which is full of computer stations and other information-finding resources; the ceiling itself is exposed sprayed-on fireproofing painted matte black; the floor is made out of polished steel plates. The diagonal in the background is an escalator, whose acid-yellow coloring, like so much in this quasi-industrial building, is an affront to conventional "good taste." The urban chic of this in-your-face design wouldn't fit everywhere, but it feels just right for this city of outdoorsmen and software programmers. It is surely no coincidence that the chief designer of the library, Joshua Prince-Ramus (who recently left Koolhaas to start his own firm), is a Washington-state native.
Image courtesy the author.
At the other end of downtown, Olympic Sculpture Park, which opened in January, occupies 8.5 acres sloping down to Elliott Bay. This unusual public garden, built by the Seattle Art Museum, is located on the site of a former fuel storage and transfer station and crosses over a railroad as well as a four-lane street before reaching the water's edge, 40 feet below. Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi's competition-winning project was a trendy zigzagging form that looks more like an earth-sculpture than a park. A nice-looking montage, but how did it turn out in practice?
Image courtesy Weiss/Manfredi and Benjamin Benschneider.
The answer is: It's turned out pretty well. As so often happens, the vagaries of construction, and the demands of a difficult site, have chipped away at the geometrical perfection of an initial idea and, in the process, improved it. The designers have wisely resisted the impulse to compete with the dramatic view of the bay and the Olympic Mountains. Instead, they have created occasional events, such as sitting walls and pockets of secluded landscape, that nudge you down the gravel path.
Image courtesy the author.
A word on the art. There is the requisite Calder stabile, a giant typewriter eraser by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen that probably looks pretty good from a passing car, and a rather wonderful Louise Bourgeois fountain. To my eye, most of the artwork doesn't quite live up to its setting, although the Richard Serra* sculpture is perfectly positioned in a secluded grove. Serra's rusted-steel monoliths, Wake, are a natural addition to the park's tough-minded design. There is nothing picturesque about the way the park itself is designed. A low balustrade that separates (but does not hide) the railroad tracks, for example, owes more to the Department of Transportation than to high art. Jersey barriers would not be out of place here. The hard-edged, unpretty landscape, and a rather industrial-looking park pavilion, are unsentimental counterpoints to the beauty of Puget Sound.
*Correction, May 17, 2007: This piece originally misidentified the artist of the sculpture Wake. It is by Richard Serra, not Anthony Caro.
Image courtesy the author.
At the lowest point of the park is a man-made beach that re-creates the original water's edge—the logs and driftwood are nature's addition. Seattle is an unusual sort of urban place, where sitting on a log to drink your grande latte seems normal (well, almost normal). Such an environment requires a different architectural response than, say, New York or Chicago. Both recent high-profile projects, the library and the sculpture park, succeed where earlier designs failed. They do so by paying attention to their surroundings and by recognizing the local sense of style, rather than importing their own. Both Koolhaas and Weiss/Manfredi, in different ways, riff on the city's unusual combination of high-tech smarts, iconoclastic roughness, and a closeness to nature: urbanism and industrial panache and driftwood.
Image courtesy the author.