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.