Published in Crosscut.com Oct. 7, 2009

Young as it is, downtown Bellevue has a strong imprint in its urban design and architecture: long blocks, plentiful open space, and architectural indifference.

Into this context drops The Bravern, the new strato-zoot shopping/office/ residential complex at Northeast 8th Street and 112th Avenue, without a hint of friction.

The buildings are impeccably tasteful, meticulously detailed, spotlessly inoffensive, and immaculately devoid of quirks or personality. Cynics will crack, “Well, of course, dummy—that’s Bellevue dead-on.” But in fact, there are enough smudges of interesting modern architecture around the edges of Bellevue’s heart to suggest a context for something different, and better.

The 1993 regional library, by Portland’s Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, is both intriguing and beautifully functional, a pairing that eluded Seattle’s Central Library. The 2008 Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center, by Jones & Jones of Seattle, is a stunning retort to the grade-it, pave-it, supersize-it suburban ethic, and an essay in how straight-line modernism can assume a surprisingly organic interaction with the land.

The Bravern’s developers and architects might better have taken some of their cues from these buildings, rather than combing ideas from Paris, London Berlin, Prague, Vienna—28 cities in all, as developer Tom Woodworth explains on the promo video. What’s arisen in Bellevue in the wake of that ambitious world tour is a pastiche that has the feeling of no particular place, but rather a placeless, genteel, utterly predictable tastefulness.

The developers cite “timeless architecture … European inspired … but authentic to the Northwest.” The reality hardly qualifies on any of those fronts, unless “timeless” means that an architectural historian from the 23rd century would have a hard time dating the ruins because the stylistic cues are so ambiguous. And The Bravern seems about as home in the Northwest as the REI flagship store would feel in Dallas.

I should break for a moment and admit to a cultural bias, which unquestionably is coloring my view. The Bravern is unabashedly aimed toward rich people. I am not rich, I don’t appreciate ostentation, and I don’t understand how rich people stay rich if they’re buying $350 shirts at Neiman-Marcus. So this isn’t my milieu. But The Bravern is billing itself as a public gathering place, so it’s fair game for evaluation on that level.

Seattle’s Callison Architecture designed The Bravern’s two mid-rise office towers and retail shops. The complex nods subtly toward Louis Sullivan in its integration of arch forms, complicated cornices, and the great rounded corner of the tower at 8th and 112th. There’s no fussy Sullivanesque ornament, of course. At street level, architecture junkies will note withpleasure the indented bays every 16 feet, embracing planters and elegant stainless-steel wire lattices that each likely cost as much as a Neiman jacket.

NBBJ, another Seattle-based architectural colossus, designed the two 34-story residential towers. They’re the crisp and streamlined siblings of The Bravern family, featuring acres of vertical glass, and the de rigueur bustle of bulges and tucks and nips to articulate the surfaces. They’re perfectly competent and forgettable.

For most of us, the heart of any Bravern experience will be the two-level piazza. It’s pretty and inviting if you appreciate formal, meticulously thought-out spaces, and if it’s not raining. The landscaping is lavish and orderly, an orchestration in terraced planters. Uniformed valets standing at attention underscore the formality, and two supersized outdoor gas fireplaces, burning merrily on a recent 80-degree day, suggest that the current century’s sustainability concerns have eluded Bellevue. Authentic Northwest? What about something to keep the rain off our heads?

The best outdoor space in  the complex looks almost like an afterthought—a narrow secondary stairway leading from 8th Street up to the piazza between the office towers. It twists a bit, so you can’t see exactly where it leads when you start up, and it’s graced with a delicate foot-high bronze fox sculpture, artfully positioned. Here’s the breath of whimsy and unpredictability that the rest of the complex lacks.

Designers of public agoras—parks, plazas, even courtyards—face an admittedly difficult balancing act. People want to feel secure, so spooky, secluded places where trouble can wait in hiding are off the table. But people also crave mystery and discovery, places that don’t reveal themselves all at once, that offer an unpredictable geography of experiences. That’s what’s missing here.

In fact, it’s a doomed errand to launch a 28-city tour of great European agoras to try to bottle and recreate their spirit in the middle of a 60-year-old American suburb, because what makes a Paris or Prague shopping street great are centuries: hundreds of years of layered ideas, styles, textures and mistakes. Such places can’t be forced into existence; they just have to be allowed to happen.

If a modern development outfit wants to create a distinctive shopping center, they’d be smarter to hire a slightly mad genius architect—I am not necessarily endorsing Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry—with instructions to not tour any existing place. Or provide an entirely blank canvas and have a dozen different architects each design a piece of it, barely talking to each other.

If the result is a fascinating mess, that’s automatically a better draw than impeccable taste. Bellevue already has more than enough of that.

Published in crosscut.com Feb. 24, 2009

What happens when an architecture critic designs a house? It’s not quite the same as if a music critic were to attempt the “Emperor” Concerto, or a restaurant critic commandeer Canlis’s kitchen for the night. Those events would be ephemeral, hustled  quickly into past tense if not quite forgotten. I’m living in this house for the rest of my life.

            I’ve nourished a passion for architecture for the last three decades, writing regularly on it for national magazines and newspapers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the past four years. I studied architecture history in grad school, but took no hands-on design courses; I never craved to actually practice architecture. This was wise. When I built my sailboat, I noticed that I have an almost immaculate inability to visualize three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional plans. The boat works, but only because I built most of it twice. I have to see something in three dimensions to understand why it doesn’t work, then take it apart and do it over again. This is what I do as architecture critic, just omitting the do-over part.

Great room

            My wife Patty and I began prospecting for Whidbey Island land a couple of years ago. We’ve always wanted to commission an architect-designed house, but every time we got close, financial reality intervened. This time, an architect friend from our years in Arizona made a stunningly generous offer: he’d do the conceptual design for the cost of a plane ride to see the site. Then we could have a local architect develop working drawings at relatively modest cost.

Did I mention reality? I interviewed architects and contractors in the neighborhood, and what I kept hearing was: minimum $250 per square foot, and that’s with Ikea cabinets. Tom Kundig, one of Seattle’s most respected residential architects, recently told me $350 would be more realistic. At the $250 level, a 1600-square-foot house on a $200,000 lot would have totaled $600,000. At that we were well over our budget—we weren’t shopping for a wink-o-matic loan—even without site prep, landscaping, or the inevitable contingencies. Sadly, we shelved our good friend’s offer.

            Why should custom building cost so outrageously? There’s a panoply of underlying issues, but at bottom is the nature of the homebuilding business. Contractors are not artists who thrive on innovation and challenge; they’re tradespeople who want to get the job done and roll rapidly on to the next one. They hate tackling anything they haven’t done before, so if they have to do it, they build in a hefty nuisance surcharge. Modern architecture is a nuisance.

            We found a developer-owned lot we liked, and the builder already had an approved plan for a 1,975-square-foot house that he’d build for substantially less than that theoretical 1,600-footer. It was a conventional Northwest rambler tricked out with ridiculous neo-Craftsman detailing, but it looked like something I could work with. We made a deal: I would redesign it over the existing footprint, then take it back to the original architect for a reality check and new working drawings.

            I bought a T-square and architect’s scale and cleared the dining table. Most architects haven’t drawn on paper for decades, but I wasn’t about to entangle my life in learning CAD (computer-aided design). Over a week that encrusted the floor with a sedimentary layer of eraser crumbs, I stripped the Craftsman clutter off the elevation and added a few contemporary details such as a frameless triangular clerestory, trying to reposition the house somewhere nearer the 21st century. I revised the floor plan to mesh with the life we envisioned. Everything seemed to work, but I couldn’t dismiss the lesson of the sailboat: We wouldn’t really know until the house appeared.

            The architect who’d drawn the original plan was unlike any I’ve dealt with in my writing about architecture: he had pictures of Jesus in his office, but none of buildings. Still, he went to work on my plans with a professional attitude and demonstrated adept problem-solving. He easily untangled a circulation mess I’d created between bath and bedroom, and probably saved us a thousand dollars through the simple expedient of lowering roof pitch. I had slashed and burned frippery to cut costs, but missed the obvious.

            The house arose last spring as we camped in a nearby rental to monitor progress. There came the usual array of surprises, each inevitably ringing up some addition to the bill. I was happily surprised by the builder’s care with quality and detail. The miters on the door and window frames were more accurate than the painstaking joinery I’d committed on my sailboat.

            A week after we moved in, my amateur design errors were brutally obvious. Most were errors of dimension, my failure to accurately envision the functionality, or the feeling, of a space as I drew it on paper. We need 25 percent more window in the east wall of the great room for morning light. The guest bathroom is a foot too narrow. The entry hall is a foot too high. After complaining for years about dumb homebuilders who hang uncovered decks in the Seattle drizzle to go unused nine months of the year, I designed a dumb covered one, too narrow to accommodate four people around a table.

            There’s also a disconnect between the face the house presents to the street and the values I’ve long staked out in my writing. Though stripped of nonsense, the house doesn’t represent what I believe. It still carries the faint whiff of nostalgia, as if it were quietly craving 

 a time-transplant to some Eisenhower-era  suburb. It seems self-consciously cute. There’s  no evident communion with the site. The  southern exposure is squandered as far as  solar energy is concerned.

 In some compensation, the spaces  inside are  far more dramatic and interesting  than the  conventional exterior suggests. If I  ever get  time to build the furniture I’ve envisioned, it could be stunning.

            What’s troubling me most is not any design issue, but our apparent cop-out. There’s a lot wrong with the way we build houses today: too costly, too unsustainable, too inflexible. Our house might have faced these issues—if we’d been willing to throw a lot more time into it, and settle for 500 fewer square feet.

            The other morning, Patty said, “It’s time to quit beating yourself up and enjoy the house.” She’s right, of course; it’s a life skill worth learning.

            What happens as an architecture critic learns to live in a highly imperfect environment of his own making? First, acceptance that there are always tradeoffs. The impulse to perfect our built environment, whether individual or communal, is itself unsustainable. There’s never enough time, money, or intelligence to get it all right. It was laughable to imagine that in a week of work playing architect I could wring a spectacular transformation in this house’s design. In retrospect, I should have cleared the boards and worked on it full-time for six months. But I already had full-time work that I had to keep doing to help pay for the house. If nothing else, I now have more empathy for architects who tell me they had to compromise in the face of budget reality.

            But there’s something deeper. In his superb book The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton suggests that “it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.” And so I begin to see my reflection in the place I call home: imperfect, compromised, at peace.

Published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Jan. 6, 2009

Watching the dizzying phalanx of new high-rises sprouting in downtown Seattle and Bellevue, you’d assume they’re all about economics—betting on maximum return from minimum footprint on ground—and you’d be mostly right. Nietzsche explained the rest: Architecture is the expression of human pride, our triumph over gravity, and the “oratory of power.”

For too many of the towers prickling the Puget Sound sky, that oratory amounts to crude, stentorian bellowing. But developers and architects are learning from these city-killing disasters, and the early 21st century is shaping up as a happier time for skylines. The current crop of towers sports more interesting sculptural shapes, more color, better detailing, and sometimes a friendlier relationship to the person-on-the- street. Favorable developments all.

There persists a nagging worry here that our increasingly dense quivers of skyscrapers may ultimately do more bad than good. Skylines bristling with power look terrific on postcards, but that’s not the same thing as a livable three-dimensional city.

More on this later. First, an appraising roundup of four of the most interesting new high-rises opening just about now:

The near-twin Bellevue Towers are the best pieces in the suburb’s entire skyline, and the most sculpturally ambitious high-rise shapes in either city. The asymmetrical five-sided forms, skewed 22 degrees on axis from each other, guarantee that they’ll never look the same from any two viewpoints on the ground, and there are a wealth of intriguing pleats and tucks in their skins.

Those tucks don’t just relieve visual monotony. They form partially enclosed residential balconies, a deft solution to one of the persistent problems in high-rise residential living. A balcony cantilevered off the side of a skyscraper can feel very much like a 400-foot-high diving board, which is why so many of them are deserted. These Bellevue balconies feel embraced and protected by the building.

The architects confess that these towers actually were designed from the inside out—intriguing floor plans for the residences, which tend toward outlines resembling  Idaho or Nevada, generated the envelopes. That could have been a recipe for chaos, but the designers imposed enough discipline that the towers look busy, but organized.

Good as they are, they still lack the proportional grace of the great skyscrapers of the 1920s, such as the Empire State Building, or locally, the 1929 Seattle Tower. Modern skyscrapers rarely step back, slimming as they rise, which is what we’d like them to do, crowding the sky less and conforming more with our common-sense intuition of how buildings stand up. Today, economics always trumps grace.

Fifteen Twenty-One 2nd Avenue [cq] is the first of the skinny, 400-foot residential towers allowed by Seattle’s 2006 downtown zoning revisions. It’s an experiment, the developer frankly admits, “to see what would work.” It works pretty well as a shape in the sky, remarkably well in its innovative carving of interior space.

Architect Blaine Weber detests “podium” high-rises, where a tower splashes onto a wide, two- to five-story base. A podium wouldn’t have been possible on this tiny, quarter-acre site anyway, but Weber says he believes in marrying the design elements of base, shaft and top to form a cohesive composition. He’s done so in this crisp, clean building, although its top, a subtle but intriguing intersection of blocks and planes, is more interesting than the rather pedestrian ground floor.

The best action takes place inside, where Weber’s magic pleats and popouts, together with the northwest-southeast alignment, has managed to provide an Elliott Bay view from every residence, including those on the “east” side of the building. The balcony issue is neatly resolved with indoor solariums where bifold doors at chest height open glassed-in corners to the sky.

There’s more smart juggling of space on the first five floors, which, although you’d never know it from the street, encloses the parking. The corners, normally wasted space in a garage, are work or hobby studios averaging 200 square feet, available for sale to residents. Actually, this is a podium base—it just doesn’t look or act the part.

The new Four Seasons, 10 floors of boutique hotel and 11 more of very high-end condos, cuts the most urbanistically sophisticated profile of all these buildings. At ground level, the architects have fashioned a useful Netherlands-style “woonerf,” or mixed car-pedestrian plaza, from the truncated west end of Union Street.  In the squared-off U-form of the condo floors, the residences jostle and step with a layered organic quality, almost like a pile of glass blocks arranged by a geometrically precocious child.

It’s a building whose skin expresses what’s going on inside, something that high-rises almost never manage. Although neither these hotel rooms nor the residences are accessible to hoi polloi, the expression activates the street, to everybody’s benefit.

The big disappointment is the routine 5-foot-wide public stairway from 1st Avenue to Western, part of the hotel development. The architects at NBBJ originally envisioned something as dramatic and inviting as Harbor Steps a block to the southeast, but too many complications arose. Too bad: Harbor Steps is the rare and luminous example of a private high-rise development that actually provided useful public space.

Of all these, Olive 8 cuts the clunkiest profile in the skyline. It’s a tall box plunked onto a wide box—a podium. Richard Gluckman, who designed the skin, tried to redeem them with tricky decoration.

Some of the trickery is almost bewitching. That grid of gargantuan  pipes just visible behind frosted glass up to the 17th floor doesn’t actually exist: it’s a masterful trompe l’oeil of fritted glass, a ceramic pattern silkscreened onto the windows. Likewise the canted ovoids in the podium glass, which were not intended to represent olives but in light of the project’s address, might as well. The blue glass fins streaking up the sides are intended as connecting elements to the balcony glass, and they look ridiculous.

The issue of how and whether to decorate a skyscraper has bedeviled architects since the close of the Art Deco era, and this building illustrates the problem. The stripped-down International Style worked best on small buildings; it typically read as deadly tedium on big ones. Playful nonsense such as Philip Johnson’s Chippendale-capped AT&T building of 1984 was like a Monty Python character bursting into a corporate board meeting: fun for once, but you don’t want to see it over and over.

The best decoration for a high-rise is built in, not tacked on. It grows out of a bold, intriguing and thoughtfully detailed sculptural form. The Columbia Center still may be Seattle’s best skyscraper simply because it’s so strong: no other building  expresses attitude, ambition and power so nakedly.

And there we arrive at the question of whether the expression of power has any relationship to quality of life. Developers don’t bother themselves with such questions, and rarely do growth-drunk city councils. The Manhattanization of Seattle and the Dallasizing of Bellevue are good for the civic ego, and for the few who can buy these pieces of the sky to live in, but what else?

It looks like it’s now too late, but what we needed at the beginning of the current skyscraper boom was a radical-populist zoning code that would have required skyscraper developers to give back something of major public value for each new building permit—a civic plaza, say, as substantial as the Harbor Steps.

That might have nipped this boom in the bud. Then again, it might have transformed Seattle into the uniquely wonderful city we keep telling ourselves it is.

WHO BUILT WHAT

Olive 8, 1816 8th Ave., Seattle, hotel and condos

Height: 38 stories

Architects: Mulvanny G2, Bellevue; Gluckman Mayner Architects, New York

Developer: R.C. Hedreen Co., Seattle

Plus: Fritted glass windows create intriguing trompe l’oeil of a grid of giant pipes that doesn’t exist

Minus: Fatuous blue glass fins

Four Seasons, 99 Union Street, Seattle, hotel and condos

Height: 21 stories

Architect: NBBJ, Seattle

Developer: The Seattle Hotel Group LLC

Plus: The tower’s busy skin expresses what’s going on inside

Minus: Afterthought stairway from Union’s end to Western Avenue

Fifteen Twenty-One, 1521 Second Ave., Seattle, condos

Height: 38 stories

Architect: Weber Thompson, Seattle

Developer: Opus Northwest LLC, Minneapolis

Plus: Unique integration of parking and work studios

Minus: Tower meets the sidewalk with a dull thud

Bellevue Towers, NE 4th Street and 106th Avenue, Bellevue, condos

Height: 42/43 stories

Architects: GBD, Portland; Mulvanny G2, Bellevue

Developer: Gerding Edlen, Portland

Plus: Sophisticated and fascinating sculptural form

Minus: Parklet between towers accessible only to residents

“Architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view,” wrote Paul Simon in a wistful little song titled “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.” It could be the lamenting anthem for Wright’s students and disciples. No religion could generate a more devout, determined army of followers, but the world has hardly cared.

            It’s their own fault. Instead of adapting Wright’s “organic architecture” ethic, they’ve mostly imitated his aesthetic, producing knockoffs in the master’s idiosyncratic style. They’ve labored outside the design mainstream, their work treasured by devoted clients but scorned by the architectural establishment. Like Wright himself, the fiercest followers have returned that scorn in full.

            The June passing of one of those Wrightians in Seattle calls for a closer and fairer look at his work. Milton Stricker, who apprenticed with Wright in 1951, left Seattle with some good buildings that offer valuable teachings about how to build gracefully in an urban setting. If some of them look eerily like Wright’s own work, that doesn’t negate their value. If we look without prejudice, they might change our point of view.

            Unlike some, Stricker never struggled to break out of the Wrightian orbit. “That was the true religion,” says his son Peter Stricker, also a Seattle architect. “It gave him a direction and a cause and a philosophy.”

            Milton Stricker grew up in Wisconsin—also Wright’s birthplace—in the Depression, abandoned by his parents and raised dirt-poor by his German-speaking grandparents. He worked at the Bremerton Naval Shipyard during the war, then studied architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Disillusioned with the austere Bauhaus vogue, he dropped out in his last year and drove uninvited to Wright’s winter compound in Arizona. Wright told him to go away.

            “Mr. Wright, I drove all the way from Pittsburgh, and I’m down to my last nickel,” Stricker begged. As Peter Stricker relates it, Wright then examined the young man’s hands, learned that he’d spent two years washing dishes and shared the architect’s Wisconsin roots, and accepted him—tuition-free.

            “I think Wright became the father he never had,” Peter Stricker says.

            The deep respect—worship, even—for Wright permeates the three-level Seattle house Stricker designed for himself and his wife, Eunice. It slips into its wooded city lot with self-effacing grace, appearing cottage-sized from the street. Inside, there’s dazzling geometric commotion—until you peer at a plan and realize it’s just a square box, rotated off the street grid and tricked up with small triangular outbreaks for the stairwell and fireplace. It’s skillful sleight-of-hand, a way to wrestle maximum spatial interest out of minimum budget. More magic: from inside, you see trees but no other houses; it feels like a far-flung country retreat. 

            There’s much less Wright style in Stricker’s 1975 Fire Station No. 24 at 401 N. 130th St. —the only overt clue is the prism-shaped slit windows. But this isn’t your basic-box neighborhood firehouse. Stricker also spun it off the grid, providing a path to drive the trucks forward into the apparatus bay instead of backing them in. On 130th Street, the vast copper roof slopes down to meet the passing eye, greatly shrinking the building’s visual mass.

            One fireman said it was the “homiest” Seattle fire station he’d served in, a tribute to its non-industrial warmth. He also noted that it seemed short on storage space, a criticism familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in a Wright house.

            Greg and Pamela Morris’s residence in the Mount Baker neighborhood illustrates how Stricker both emulated and diverged from his teacher. Outside, it doesn’t look like Wright. It’s a tall box with a wraparound deck, a stucco jacket, and only one fussbudget doodad—an outdoor lamp built as a stack of wooden boxes throwing off cantilevered planes—of the kind that Wright passed off as “organic” ornamentation. Stricker was respecting his clients’ tight budget, which Wright rarely did.

            “Good architecture doesn’t have to cost a lot of money,” Stricker told the Morrises, and invested their budget box with details they’ve come to love. Strategic window placement gives the Morrises a view of the Lake Washington sunrise from their bed. An ironing board drops out of a hidden cove in the kitchen wall, allowing ironing with a view.

            Although Stricker listened respectfully to what the Strickers wanted, once he began designing, he didn’t do much collaborating. “He said he ‘wanted input,’ but what it amounted to was we got to pick the bathroom color,” Greg Morris says. “He was a meek, shy person, but when it came to his design, he would not compromise.”

            His son concurs. “He designed a lot of churches, where he had to work with building committees. They’d want to cut off a roof overhang, and he was really committed to that design. He would spend weeks in turmoil and agony.”

            Still, Peter Stricker thinks his father enjoyed a happy life in architecture because he was largely able to practice according to his ideals. He was willing to “fight for them, suffer for them, defend them against a mediocre, materialistic, uninformed society.”

            That’s exactly how Wright loved to position himself. He published a collection of his lectures with the title “Truth Against the World.” The difference, Peter Stricker says, is that Wright’s posture “was a case of arrogance and ego. With my dad, it was just idealistic. He was a purist.”

            Milt Stricker practiced alone, only briefly belonged to the American Institute of Architects—he resigned in disgust at the other members’ pieces that got published—and never won a major public commission. His work, though, blends Wright’s geometric drama and imaginative responses to site with a self-effacing serenity that frequently  eluded his teacher. An architect could do worse, and many have.

[—30—]

Interior Design magazine, August 2008

Twenty-five structural concrete columns, pocked and scarred and showing every one of their 80 years of ignoble service, paraded through the raw space that Seattle’s R.C. Hedreen Company had targeted for its new offices. What to do? Hiding them between interior walls was out of the question; most of the 10,800 square-foot floor plate wanted to remain open to daylight—increasingly precious within the thickening gang of much taller towers in downtown Seattle. Celebrating the columns would have seemed ludicrous—they were merely clunky, not intriguingly quirky.

So NBBJ interior designers Rysia Suchecka and Anne Cunningham ordered up a single Texas limestone block wall and placed it on strategic exhibit flanking the reception desk and elevator bank. The limestone, like the concrete, was blotched and pitted—but with fossils of ancient shellfish. At some level, everyone who enters the office now absorbs the textural connection between the dilapidated concrete and the dazzling limestone, and begins to understand the former as an artifact of culture, paralleling the latter as a record of evolutionary biology.

“I feel like I’m walking around in something between a brand-new facility and a ruin,” says a delighted Dick Hedreen, company founder and principal.

“He never said, ‘Make it a backdrop for art,’” Suchecka says. “He just said, “Make it elegant, subtle, restrained, a place where it feels good to be.” Those specifications, however, formed a natural invitation for substantial pieces of Hedreen’s personal collection, which includes works by Rauschenberg and Stella. Eleven big pieces now grace the company headquarters.

The seven executive offices line the perimeter of the floor on two sides, and they’re designed with meticulous attention to light and detail. To preserve privacy from eyes on the street below, the designers printed swarms of overlapping Hedreen insignias on the lower portion of the outside windows. Higher up, the swarms thin and finally evaporate into full transparency. The inside wall of each office is a pair of 10-foot-high sliding glass partitions, one transparent, one frosted, that move to fine-tune the occupant’s desired degree of privacy. Above the partitions, interior clerestory windows insure that every last lumen of daylight sweeps through the offices and into the interior work zones. The offices’ bronze door pulls are particularly designed to give tactile pleasure; Suchecka and Cunningham even commissioned U.S. Starcraft to produce a mockup, then fine-tuned it with assorted-sized human hands.

More felicitous details: The designers preserved the building’s 1927 gravity-fed mail chute, complete with bronze slot, as a vertical element beside the elevator bank. Where a felt-clad wall turns a corner, the designers specified a slim, floor-to-ceiling metal blade inset at a 135-degree angle so that passing shoulders wouldn’t eventually rub the felt into shabby disrepair. The executive offices all incorporate custom-designed walnut-veneered work wall boxes and built-in bookcases, and their free-standing oval tables are a generous 34 inches deep, providing space for a sprawl of architectural drawings and documents.

And then there’s the big picture—the feel of the space, engendered by NBBJ’s manipulation of very simple geometric elements. Everything is severely rectilinear; it’s all long, narrow planes, slabs and volumes, and there’s an underlying visual tension between fierce vertical and determined horizontal thrusts. The door pulls punch vertically as powerfully as the credenzas sprawl horizontally. Because the energy seems absolutely balanced in both directions, the overarching sensation is one of serenity. The forces are in repose. The architecture quietly recedes, leaving the art to provide the sizzle.

It seems significant, though, that every guest’s and employee’s arrival and departure inevitably encounters that 18-foot-long limestone wall. There’s no art displayed on it, nothing at all except a modestly sized company logo. It’s all about the stone itself, its texture, history, gravity, and the delight of discovering unexpected detail. An enterprise looking for an architectural metaphor for itself could hardly ask for more.

Published in Arizona Highways, July 2008

ne day in the early 1890s—a sweltering summer afternoon, most likely—a woman named Margaret Ann Paul hatched a cool idea for improving the adobe home she had recently bought on Tucson’s North Main Avenue: wrap a Victorian veranda around it to block the brutal afternoon sun from the walls.

A painstaking reconstruction of that veranda surrounds the house today in its current incarnation as El Presidio Bed & Breakfast. Despite modern air conditioning, owner Patti Toci says the 19th-century porch makes 21st-century sense, creating a delightful outdoor room in moderate weather and keeping the west-facing rooms cool on summer afternoons. It also lends the architecture a quality that is less tangible but equally real: a sense of rightful place in the desert.

All desert architecture ought to major in shade, yet most of it doesn’t. Since the 1950s, architects and homebuilders have largely battled the summer sun with the brute force of refrigeration rather than the grace of common sense. The good news is that with the increasing concern for conservation and sustainability, architectural shade is making a comeback. Shaded walkways are appearing in downtown Phoenix. Cities are commissioning artists to design dramatically shaded transit stops. More architects are deploying shade devices in unconventional and imaginative ways. It’s not yet the signature of Arizona architecture, but some people are asking why it can’t be. “Why aren’t we copying these kinds of successes all over the Valley?” rhetorically wondered The Arizona Republic in a 2005 campaign for shade. “The sun must have addled our brains.”

The prehistoric Hohokam who farmed this same valley were not addled. “We know the Hohokam built shade ramadas; we’ve excavated them,” says Phoenix City Archaeologist Todd Bostwick. Since the Hohokam did everything outdoors except, presumably, “sleeping and sex,” Bostwick says, the ramadas were essentials of life.

Intriguingly, millennium-old Hohokam ramadas look very much like the modern ramadas on the Tohono O’odham Reservation west of Tucson: four or more mesquite-trunk posts imbedded in the ground support a roof of saguaro ribs. The prime difference is that modern tribal builders sometimes visit the hardware store for wire to secure the ribs in case of wind. It’s more evidence that the O’odham are the direct descendants of the Hohokam, and support for Louis Sullivan’s famous principle: “Form ever follows function.”

xcept it doesn’t, always. When Spanish and then Anglo settlers began filtering into Arizona, their first responses to the climate were in forms as well-reasoned as those of the Hohokam. The Spaniards and Mexicans built thick-walled adobe houses with interior courtyards that would enjoy shade through most of the day. Anglos introduced the Territorial style, which shaded walls with deep verandas.

The Spanish Colonial Revival, which stormed across the Southwest after San Diego’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition, was an Anglo romantic fantasy from foundation to cupola, but it contributed delightful shade structures in the form of arcades. These not only provided relief from the heat; the brilliant contrasts of light and shadow thrown through the arches also became part of the architecture. Excellent examples include the 1917 Ajo town plaza, the 1928 Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, and the 1928 Brophy College Preparatory School in Phoenix.

But then came air conditioning—first the 1930s evaporative “swamp coolers,” and two decades later refrigeration, which ignited Arizona’s population rocket. Shade was all but forgotten in the rush; the force driving Arizona architecture was to invest the young state with the air of prosperity and sophistication. If this meant building the glass boxes that were in vogue everywhere else, refrigerated air was up to the job.

But a few architects, starting in the 1970s, had contrary ideas. In Tucson, Judith Chafee designed a 3,800 square-foot house with an enormous latticed ramada hovering overhead. It cast striped shade in summer and admitted winter light to warm the southern façade. The banded shadows on the walls coyly echoed the vertical ribbing of the saguaros surrounding the house. Chafee’s Ramada House made a national splash in architects’ journals, but tucked away on a secluded street, it stirred no great local interest.

In the 1980s, Robert Frankeberger enveloped a downtown Phoenix pavilion and a Mesa development’s visitor center with boldly sculptural wooden laths. The Mesa project in particular demonstrated what powerful architecture a shade device could be. It gathered over the building like the protective wings of a great mother bird, while inside, visitors enjoyed the duality of participating in the desert while still feeling sheltered from it.

In 1995, Scottsdale, among other Arizona cities, began commissioning artists to design bus stops, and the streets began breaking out in whimsy and panache. Scottsdale’s 20 commissions included an elegant Kevin Berry design that looks like a rogue wave looming over a doomed sail. If it isn’t exactly desert imagery, it still serves desert bus riders well—the two steel curves cradle them in a cocoon of mottled shade. Of course these shelters cost more than off-the-shelf street furniture. But Margaret Bruning, associate director of Scottsdale Public Art, puts it nicely: “We can either have transportation infrastructure, or jewels in the streetscape.” 

ddie Jones arrived in Arizona in 1973 as a young architect fresh out of Oklahoma State University. He joined the venerable Phoenix firm of Lesher & Mahoney, which sent him on a statewide errand to study Native American communities. The firm had government contracts to design reservation housing. What Jones saw on the Papago (now Tohono O’odham) reservation changed his architectural life.

“The ramadas were the perfect symbol for Sonoran Desert architecture,” he says. “Indigenous materials, filtered sunlight, self-ventilating, no moving parts. I think every building I’ve done since has been a variation on them.”

For one Phoenix office building, Jones designed one of those ubiquitous glass boxes, but then swaddled it in a wraparound lattice of Trex slats—the same recycled plastic-and-sawdust planks homeowners use for decks. For another in Tempe, Jones designed east and west walls with concrete blocks turned on their sides so their voids faced outward, each one forming a miniature window sunken eight inches deep into the wall, welcoming indirect light but not the dead-on fury of the sun.

Why doesn’t every Arizona architect deploy shade so creatively? Jones answers diplomatically. “I’m an optimist. People are more and more interested in sustainability, and Phoenix has a lot of smart people. It’s just got to reach a critical mass where it becomes the thing to do.”

That critical mass is already imbedded in the Tucson studio Line and Space. Les Wallach, its founder, grew up in the desert mining town of Superior, and his native sense of Arizona’s light and heat shaped his design philosophy as much as anything he learned in architecture school. He tries to design every project with a roof area at least 50 percent larger than the building’s footprint. The shade not only creates outdoor rooms, but also transition zones that ease the shock of moving from brilliant sunlight to indoor space.

The new University of Arizona Poetry Center, opened just last October, [2007] dramatically demonstrates how Wallach orchestrates shade. Distinctions between indoors and out are blurred. A shaded entry court between two enclosed sections serves to draw people in for a tentative look “in case they’re a little scared of poetry,” Wallach says. A wall of 13-foot-high glass doors in the auditorium opens to the court for overflow seating. On the south side, an outdoor odeum is roofed to enjoy shade during summer, while direct sun slips underneath in winter. To the east, a bamboo garden shades a window wall from the morning sun. The sunny west side is guarded by deep eaves and miserly windows.

It’s a complicated building with spaces that have ambiguous qualities depending on the light, the season, and the way people are using them. “You couldn’t ask for better architecture clients than poets,” Wallach says.

And for architects like these, you couldn’t ask for a better place than the Sonoran Desert to create interesting and dramatic buildings. “For some people, the desert climate seems like a constraint,” says Jones. “For me, it’s a form-giver. It’s a joy to figure out how to deal with the light and heat, and do it differently every time. It’s not something to run away from or pretend it isn’t there. It’s a source of inspiration.”

Interior Design, May 2008

he private office used to be a Microsoft perk, one more recruiting enticement to go with the legendary stock options, long-but-loose hours, and all-you-can-drink Starbucks. But at the software giant’s new high-rise sales and marketing outpost in downtown Bellevue, Washington, all those private offices have gone the way of—well, all those instant fortunes spinning off the company’s stock. In their place is an open-floor design that creates a smorgasbord of environments for informal interaction, meetings, and private work.

“In general, it’s probably good to have serene, focused spaces,” says Shannon Rankin, principal of Seattle’s SkB Architects, which executed the interiors. “But maybe you have a problem that needs a quick, intense hit with a loud, raucous meeting. If the spaces were all the same, they would always promote the same kind of interaction.”

The Microsoft offices occupy floors 14 to 28 of a new high-rise in Bellevue’s burgeoning thicket of towers (at last count, nine cranes elbowed into the skyline). The 15th is a reception and meeting-room floor, the penthouse is a company café—don’t call it a “cafeteria”—and the remainder are mostly dedicated to the company’s workaday marketing business. For those floors, SkB created three alternating themes centered around golf, a pool hall, and a spa.

Almost inevitably, the themes carry an undercurrent of gender bias, even though there’s certainly no segregation in the work force. The “pool hall” floors are decidedly masculine, with dark tones, heavy furniture and fully functioning pool tables. There’s a high-tech hearth in the form of a video screen inset into a black wall. The “spa” theme features watery blues and greens, a massage chair, and zen fountain. The “golf” floors feel androgynous and ourdoorsy, with miniature putting greens and holes. The designers expressed each theme in an open hub with informal meeting spaces clustered around it. Depending on time of day and personal whim, a hub might accommodate a hubbub of activity, or a lone worker hunched over a notebook computer.

Microsoft had an overarching vision of open spaces that would facilitate casual interaction and collaboration, but they didn’t dictate the design themes. “We had programming sessions with them and asked questions like, ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What do you want to express to others?’” Rankin says. “They seemed a little lost at those questions, so we decided to have some fun with it. Sales and marketing is a lively group, not too reserved or quiet, so we knew we didn’t have to go with innocuous colors and forms.”

The “fun” is sophisticated and carefully zoned, however, and no one will mistake this for a wacky, off-the-wall software start-up. A custom-designed cedar structure in each “golf” hub, for example, provides casual warmth and amphitheater-like seating for group meetings or conversation. But its crisp, rectilinear lines still  suggest the air of business, not playground frolics.

Instead of offices, KI workstations gather in small clusters, customized with translucent glass partitions that extend not quite up to eye height and provide their occupants with diminutive tchotchke shelves. Workstation areas are divided from corridors with translucent panels that provide an intermediate level of privacy: daylight passes through, but not information.

There’s a sense that the entire design poises on a delicately balanced equilibrium between public and private space, and between randomness and order. But there’s such an array of varied environments—and so little structure in the form of who-belongs-where mandates—that individuals simply roam around and discover whatever works for each.

The designers confirm that the balancing was tricky. “We were trying to create flexible spaces, but at the same time spaces that have meaning and definition,” says project designer Jami Howard. Adds Rankin, “We as designers have to let go and allow people to imprint the space, allow them to make it not perfect.” However, they couldn’t let go altogether. Throughout the hubs, they sprinkled small clues to keep the design from deconstructing itself—the teal lounge chair fabric, for example, gently hints that the chairs are to hang around with the blue-green carpet.

Around lunchtime, the 900-odd Microsofties working in the building gravitate to the 28th-floor café, where Rankin and Howard successfully banished any hint of the dreary company-cafeteria genre. There are stunning views, to start with—Lake Washington to the west, Mt. Rainier to the south, with an outdoor deck for the prime volcano view. The ceiling is peeled open to expose the building’s entrails, not so much for high-tech effect but to make full use of an exhilarating 20-foot height. Like the work floors, the dining room is divided into zones that create the feel of restaurant environments with different levels of intimacy or formality—a clubby private-party room, an airy diner, a neighborhood bistro. Probably wisely, the designers didn’t try to clutter these spaces with thematic elements, which could only have competed ineffectively with the views.

While it’s far from zany or chaotic, SkB’s design shows how a bit of liberated fun can fit inside the skin of a business-suited office tower. It’s all about variety and choice—a pretty attractive perk in itself.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 27, 2008

ut in the presumed cultural wastelands of the ‘burbs, housing developers typically commission the most, or only, stimulating design for the sales center. The underlying assumption is that browsers might be lured in by a cool landmark building, but they’re too cautious to spring for something interesting to actually live in.

Surprisingly, that same principle appears to be operating in Paul Allen’s burgeoning South Lake Union neighborhood, where the “Discovery Center,” a sleek shed designed to eventually be unbolted and trucked away, remains the most intriguing building in the developer’s portfolio.

Enough of this neighborhood has now unfolded that some assessments are possible, and frankly, it’s disappointing. Check out the new Westlake/Terry Building (Group Health’s headquarters) at 320 Westlake Avenue North, and the soon-to-be-completed Veer Lofts, Rollin Street and Enso condos, which you can ponder as models in the Discovery Center. All are in Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate portfolio and all are perfectly respectable but bland, conservative, and infected with a tedious sameness. There are excellent urbanist ideas and delightful details here and there, but overall, the neighborhood is shaping up to be an architectural bore.

Its most interesting buildings, apart from the Discovery Center, are all non-Vulcan projects: the REI flagship, a scattering of small historic properties, and the new ultra-green Terry Thomas office building.

What’s happening here? Basic economics. Spec commercial buildings and mass-market housing seldom hang out on the cutting edge because it’s too risky. Still, you’d like to think that the guy who commissioned Frank Gehry to plunk a clump of psychedelic steel mushrooms into Seattle Center would embark on South Lake Union—a much more important project to Seattle—with a pep talk to the effect of, “Let’s try a bunch of cool stuff like EMP—just better.”

The sort of building that the city’s most influential developer ought to be putting up has just opened, in fact, at Terry Avenue and Thomas Street. But  instead it’s the project of First Western Development, designed by its principal tenant, the architecture firm Weber Thompson.

Its most newsworthy feature is its lack of air conditioning. Adjustable sun shades, automated louvers, opening windows and a tall interior courtyard that functions as a thermal chimney provide all the cooling—the architects hope—that it will need. But it’s not only about conservation. On one of our few warm spring days so far, there was a discernable fresh-air breeze wafting through the building, along with the noise of assorted street commotion and the blended aromas of blooming flowers and diesel. “I think we’re more connected to the neighborhood,” said Weber Thompson architect Peter Greaves, “and I think that will lead to more informed design decisions as we work in this building.” Agreed.

In form, Terry Thomas is just a box, but it’s a busy, revved-up composition that sizzles with the contrapuntal layering of horizontal lines—steel siding corrugations, louvers and shades. It looks like a machine, which is an honest representation. And it might be the Toyota Prius of office buildings, demonstrating that an efficient future need not feel drab and deprived.

The Vulcan buildings are likewise boxes, but there’s been an effort to soften their expanses of steel, glass and concrete with brick accents, and occasionally a token curving parapet or slanting wall. In principle, this should work—“softer” textures and forms are generally needed to make residents feel welcome in a mixed residential-commercial neighborhood. But Vulcan’s slogan for the neighborhood, “Rethink Urban,” seems to promise an edgy attitude that these boxes don’t deliver. 

They are delivering some nice pedestrian-oriented streetscapes.

The sidewalk on the Minor Avenue side of Alcyone, Vulcan’s big apartment building, is landscaped with trees that form a canopy embracing the sidewalk, and the jazzy farrago of textures and colors on the building’s ground floor create plenty of visual interest. The new Amazon world headquarters sprawling four blocks between Terry and Boren avenues will absorb the historic Van Vorst warehouse into the complex, and feature landscaped alleys, mini-plazas, and a 31-foot-wide sidewalk on the Terry side.

With amenities like these, it may not matter if the buildings turn out to be merely forgettable background, which renderings suggest they will. As a neighborhood grows taller and denser, the spaces between buildings ironically turn out to be more important design issues than the buildings themselves.

Still, it’s disappointing that SLU’s architecture isn’t living up to the tantalizing suggestion first provided by the Miller/Hull Partnership’s design for the Discovery Center. As the Vulcan people say, the center “represents a lot of what we’re about,” with interior materials totaling more than 80 percent recycled content and a raw, industrial, high-tech envelope that still seems sophisticated, inviting and intimately scaled.

Here’s the conundrum: the money gushing into the neighborhood is making an enhanced street life possible—good landscaping, public art, sidewalk cafes, preservation of some worthy historic buildings, and support of parks (Vulcan pitched $10 million toward the renovation of Lake Union Park). But it’s  that same big-time money that erases the opportunities for low-rise, human-scaled, edgy and even funky architecture.

It’s probably too much to ask for both. But both are what great cities are made of.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 29, 2008

hat shall we do with the buildings now pushing 50 and “historic”? How do we sort through the midden of mid-century modernism, which many people see as the most desolate, aloof and dislikable period in the history of architecture, and rescue the jewels?

It’s time to start making some decisions, even though there may be a generational dissonance in the debate. Here’s a basic truth about architecture: a style is almost always held in contempt by the children of the generation that produced it. It’s the grandchildren who finally begin to treasure it.

That might explain why Abby Martin, a University of Washington architecture student, has filed a National Register nomination to try to save the UW’s 1961 Nuclear Reactor Building, whose atomic guts were decommissioned in 1988. It’s the most bizarre and anomalous building on campus, a structure that vaguely resembles a ‘60s swoop-roof diner with fins flying out from under the eaves—all executed in concrete. To some of us, it’s the bastard love child of Brutalism and Burger King.

But to Martin, “It’s a rare combination of architectural value and historic value. The shape is really dynamic, it’s very expressive of the possibilities of concrete, and it also embodies the ideology of the time, where architects were rejecting so many historical conventions.”

This is an example of what’s now happening with mid-century modernism. There’s just enough cultural distance between the assorted styles of the ‘50s and ‘60s and today that they’re beginning to acquire the faint whiff of exoticism. In some cases, that attraction is overcoming their essential repugnance or silliness.

The Ballard Denny’s is another example. The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board granted it local landmark status in February, and the property owners promptly filed suit, calling the decision  “sentimental and capricious.” That’s at least half right; arguments for preserving Daffy Duck architecture are necessarily based on sentiment. It’s like keeping a dog-eared comic book as a memento of long-ago childhood.

But is it important to preserve such buildings for the sake of cultural memory? There’s no sweeping answer. The route to making good decisions is to look at the whole spectrum of reasons for preserving each building, case by case.

If the Denny’s had been an honest effort to develop an authentic Northwest regional style—and there are good contemporary examples, like Paul Hayden Kirk’s Magnolia Branch Library of 1964—the argument for preservation would be solid. But the Denny’s is pure California, a cheap carnival of look-at-me design that says little about Seattle’s character or the Northwest’s natural environment.

An equally quirky oddment from the late ‘50s is the tiny Egan House on Lakeview Boulevard overlooking Lake Union. It’s pure geometry, a white wedge chiseling into a forested hillside like an alien starship’s landing shuttle. Historic Seattle acquired and rehabbed it 10 years ago, and has been leasing it to assorted residential tenants for the last several years.

Does anything make it more worth preservation than the Denny’s?  Although its nonprofit savior wouldn’t dare put it this way, it’s a valuable illustration of midcentury modernism’s attitude that architecture had a divine right to trump nature. This is one of the reasons for architectural conservation—keeping a record of civilization’s cycles of thinking, including those that now appear foolish, arrogant, or even destructive.

The Egan house has the added advantage of being extremely small, and because of it, cute. That’s another principle that’s now becoming apparent: most forms of modernism worked better as small buildings than big ones. There’s a tiny 1960 glass-box office building at 1264 Eastlake Ave. that’s almost pure Mies, and it’s sheer delight. But scale Mies’s puritanical minimalism into something the size of the late and unlamented 1959 Central Library, and you had mind-numbing banality.

Seattle Center, recently thrust into debate by the Century 21 Committee’s renovation proposals, presents a more complicated problem. The park comprises several different shoots of modernism, assorted levels of quality, a history that’s intertwined with Seattle’s emergence on the world stage, and a prime location that begs for updated uses—including more architecture-free open space. Juggling all the demands within the Seattle Process may mean that these buildings get saved by default: the studies, hearings and referenda might roll on forever.

But here’s one possibility: preserve the center as an open-air museum of 1960s architecture. The Northwest Rooms are decent if not superlative examples of the International Style; Key Arena is a demonstration of Architecture Power, a serious example of how technological virtuosity can translate into a sculptural structure of surprising emotional impact. The Pacific Science Center is cloying, but its forest of neo-Gothic arches is as delicate and lacy as Formalism ever managed. Even the 2000 Experience Music Project fits the ‘60s circle in a way, as an inadvertent temple to acid-tripping.

Most of these mid-century movements led to dead ends. The minimalist International Style offered too few possibilities in form, surface and decorative detail to sustain interest, and Formalism buckled under the dead weight of its own empty pretensions. Brutalism never enjoyed any affection outside the architectural journals.

But their disgrace is actually a reason in itself to preserve some monuments of modernism.

Architecture, like art and literature, encapsulates our history, mistakes included. Modernism’s sweeping error was to believe that abstract ratiocination—its practitioners  were always busy building intellectual arguments for their cold, arrogant or silly buildings—could replace the qualities people had always treasured in architecture: surprise, mystery, emotion, texture, color, ornament and human scale. We don’t need another period like it, so we should probably keep some reminders.