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On Architecture: Pointing in the right direction
Architecture, like food and fashion, cycles through phases, and not all of them are endearing. A particularly low moment -- actually an agonizing 30 years -- can be found in high-rise building design, 1950 to 1980.
But since then the barometer has been struggling fitfully upward, and we can judge how far it's risen by comparing the two towers now squeezed onto the downtown block next to the Central Library.
The 5th and Madison luxury condo tower is lighter, more airy and more delicately detailed than its high-rise neighbors. (January 29, 2008)
Credit: Joshua Trujillo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The 1974 Union Bank tower, a stiff, doleful palooka in the Formalist style, punches 42 stories into the Seattle sky without a shred of expression or grace. It looks better the farther away you get, but that's hardly a compliment. Up close it's as cold as a generic tombstone, and it couldn't care less where it resides -- it would be equally at home in Seoul or Santiago.
That's odd, because its architect, John Graham Jr., was a Seattle native and co-designer of our most iconic landmark, the Space Needle.
Its new blockmate, the waferlike 24-story 5th and Madison luxury condo tower, is almost as generic, but it looks vastly lighter, more airy and graceful, and much more delicately detailed. Instead of slamming into the street with a colossal thud, it rolls out welcoming gestures -- a Bartell store on the Fifth Avenue side and a pocket park, open to the public, wedged into the 60 feet between the building and Union Bank (now renamed 901 Fifth Avenue).
The firm Ruffcorn Mott Hinthorne Stine of Seattle designed the new building, and Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg of Vancouver, B.C., landscaped the park.
The finlike balconies snapped onto the building's north and east sides add a pleasantly busy hum of texture to the downtown streetscape, and imply a human scale that's absent in the neighboring monolith. A few modest tweaks to its boxy envelope -- there's one 80-degree corner, and another of 105 -- relieve the monotonous throb of right angles.
The one bit of silliness is the 250-foot-high ribbon of silver, turquoise and purple stainless steel shingles on the south wall. It was needed, says architect Ev Ruffcorn, to give occupants in the 901 building something to look at besides a blank vertical prairie. But gratuitous ornamentation is usually worse than honest ennui, and so it is here.
In all, though, 5th and Madison confirms that we're back in a healthy and agreeable phase of high-rise fashion. What it doesn't tell us for sure is that such towers are advancing the quality of life in Seattle.
That question takes us up to one of the two 24th-story penthouses at 5 p.m. on a mid-January evening, where the overcast sky has parted just enough to expose a brilliant cantaloupe-colored sunset over Elliott Bay. It's a spectacular sight -- or would be, if it weren't for the 40-story IDX Tower's widebody bisect of the scenery.
The elephant across the street doesn't seem to have discouraged Kennedy Wilson, the Beverly Hills investment firm that owns 5th and Madison, from asking $2.65 million for the 2,200-square-foot penthouse. Maybe it's worth it -- value is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But maybe it also illustrates the skewed thinking in our sudden rush to become a vertical residential city.
On the south side of the 5th and Madison tower rises a colorful, 250-foot-high ribbon of stainless steel shingles. (January 29, 2008)
Credit: Joshua Trujillo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The more of these towers that sprout downtown (and likewise in Bellevue), the less view remains for each resident and office tenant. The Seattle skyline may look increasingly impressive from the deck of the Bainbridge ferry, but it's not so enchanting from inside the thicket. Nine new towers are under construction downtown, and there are 25 more undergoing permitting or design review.
When the view consists mainly or entirely of other buildings, is there any point to it? Traditionally, yes -- the fundamental rationale for the American skyscraper has always been to express power, wealth and urbanity. Seattle, though, is different -- or at least it used to be. Our great value resides in the city's natural setting, not in its buildings. Here, density extracts a penalty that doesn't exist in, say, Minneapolis or Dallas.
The developer deserves two cheers for carving out a half-acre plaza and throwing it open to public use, but its value also is compromised by the density around it. You're surrounded by 40-story towers, and there's no escaping the feeling of being a pika in a pit, trapped by steep walls. It's a pleasant parklet, enhanced by Katsura trees and a linear fountain, but it's not a grand enough space to feel like a celebration of humanity. It's a quotation from nature, placed on exhibit to remind urban residents of the world outside.
Designer Greg Smallenberg is well aware of the problem. "The space is being daunted by the scale of the towers, no question," he says. "But the more spaces like this that get created in Seattle, the more the relentless march of street, wall and tower will begin to break down."
Even now, the vertical city offers some obvious advantages. There's no debating that high-rise downtown living is vastly more sustainable than suburban sprawl. Sales brochures for 5th and Madison justifiably extol the amenities within walking distance (or in real-estate parlance, "steps away") such as Qwest and Safeco fields and the 5th Avenue Theatre.
But there's the nagging feeling in this corner that Seattle is welcoming vertical sprawl as a kind of architectural default mode, and assuming that the handsomer class of high-rise exemplified by 5th and Madison is by definition the stuff of which great cities are made. We should question the assumption. Maybe the answer is neither the skyscraper pincushion nor the self-indulgent ooze of McMansions, but some new form of neighborhood that respects the unique environment of this place.
The long postwar boom in dreary tall buildings arose on Mies van der Rohe's famous epigram, "Less is more." In Mies's skilled hands it actually was, but few other architects ever stripped a box to its pristine essentials and made it anything but boring. What we're seeing now is a resurgent flowering of tall-building design, but it has arrived at a time when Seattle's downtown is already too dense, too crowded with bad 30-year-old buildings, and not cognizant enough of human scale and natural beauty. More is now less.
Lawrence W. Cheek is a freelance writer on architecture and author of "Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona." Contact him at
escrito48@comcast.net.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/ae/349...tecture29.html
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