Published in WoodenBoat magazine #203, July/August 2008

 wooden boat will take every bit of perfectionism you can throw at it,” warned  the owner of a 33-foot sloop. “You’ve got to be very dedicated and very anal,” said a man detailing a classic lobster boat converted to cruising. And there was the skipper of a stunning 78-foot schooner, deflecting questions on how the crew could possibly keep up with her maintenance: “I say, how can you not keep up with it? How can you ignore the responsibility of maintaining a thing of such beauty, 52 tons of the finest wood ever grown?”

I was absorbing all this five years ago, my first time wandering the docks at a wooden boat festival, casually interviewing owners. It wasn’t an auspicious introduction for a recovering perfectionist beginning to consider buying or building a wooden boat. I’d wrestled with the perfectionist demon in my writing for decades, finally realizing that it had led to creative paralysis and chronic dissatisfaction—and alcohol to blunt the pain—and had reached a reasonable balance in most corners of my life. Taking on a wooden boat threatened the peace.

The demon dwells in the culture of wooden boats. Building, restoring or just maintaining one can bring into bloom a latent inclination to obsession. In Building Small Boats, Greg Rössel argues sensibly for a middle ground: “Don’t look for perfection,” he advises. “We’re not building a Steinway piano. The goal is just good old-fashioned clean workmanship—a job that fits well and looks good.” The perfectionist’s automatically obsessive mind will take these very words and grow an argument for monomaniacal attention to detail. “’Good old-fashioned clean workmanship’ is perfection,” he’ll argue. “Why shouldn’t a boat have the same level of craftsmanship as a Steinway—or better? Nobody’s life depends on a piano.”

How good, then, is good enough? If we settle on a middling level of quality merely because it falls into a personal comfort zone, how then does humanity make progress?

n the broad sweep of human affairs, perfectionism is not a bad thing. Voltaire famously wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good,” but the observation is equally valid if we spin it around: The good is the enemy of the best. In many arenas, pushing for perfection is clearly the right thing, the moral thing, to do. Where would air travel be if Boeing weren’t continually striving to make the perfectly safe airliner? Fifty years ago, commercial flight was vastly more hazardous than it is today. Look at Brahms, the classic self-torturing perfectionist. He relentlessly burned scores that didn’t meet his own standards, and once told a protégé (whose music we’ve forgotten) that “…you seem to me too easily satisfied … I never cool down over a work, once begun, until it’s perfected, unassailable.”

Brahms’ perfect music has enriched humanity beyond measure, but my reading of his life is that his temperament also extracted an enormous price in personal misery. He sought perfection in love and friendship, but because human behavior, unlike his musical creation, was beyond his control, he failed in relationships again and again.

We seem to be confronting a perfect dilemma. For the individual, striving for perfection, or even objective excellence, is often personally destructive. But for the sake of humanity, it’s essential. Without this push, we don’t enrich the quality of life on earth.

I was eight months into the construction of a Sam Devlin-designed daysailer before I mustered the nerve to introduce myself to the designer and ask some questions. We ended up talking for two hours in his waterfront office at the southern tip of Puget Sound, and part of it turned to a discussion of the demon. “As you’ve learned, you can work on these things forever,” he said. “There’s no end to how far you can take it. The place we stop is the place where it’s better than what we did on the boat just before.”

That sounded like a satisfying solution—for a professional builder. I didn’t have a benchmark, aside from Devlin’s plans and a mental vision of what the boat should be. Another of the hazards of wooden boatbuilding is that the physical process takes a long time, which means that the vision also has time to solidify and assume a lustrous and seductive aura. When one doesn’t have great boatbuilding chops, that vision progressively dies, leaving a residue that feels very much like grief.

I took another fact-finding expedition to Gabriola Island, British Columbia, where Peter Gron, who I’d met online through his blog, was building a 22’ 8” full-keel sloop to another Devlin design. Like me, Gron was an amateur building his first boat; unlike me, he started with a full array of carpentry skills and the patience to think through problems and even build mockups before throttling ahead. Gron’s craftsmanship was and is exquisite. He was also building his boat to a vision, part of which was that this boat will define him, demonstrate what he’s capable of doing, and more importantly, show what he believes in. Click here for Peter Gron’s blog     Excellent as his skills are, he’s occasionally stalled short of his ideal, and it’s caused him plenty of grief—as his blog candidly admits. His friends think he’s a perfectionist. He insists not, then adds, “Maybe I’m in denial.” He does follow a rule-of-thumb on detail work: “If you have to use a dental mirror and flashlight to see it, you’re going too far.”

Gron headlined his November 2007 report: “I’m In Hell” and recounted an agonizing month of varnishing, sanding, and endlessly revarnishing the cabin interior. First it was too glossy—“like a funhouse, reflections everywhere”—then jaundiced yellow. “Someone probably could point to that and call it perfectionism,” he told me. “I really don’t think perfection was the issue. I had a vision of the interior as something warm, honest, not ostentatious. This environment was pretty high up on the scale of importance to me. I spent a few days, as always, asking: can I modify the  picture? Can I see myself being happy in there the way it is? I couldn’t, so I had to keep at it.”

Here’s the difference, I think, between Gron and the helplessly obsessive  perfectionist: Peter hasn’t lost sight of the core goal, which is to build a boat that gives pleasure—not one that fulfills an abstract ideal. “If I look back on what I’ve made and I’m able to see the care that was put into it, even if the result isn’t perfect, that makes me happy.”

When my boat was more or less finished, I towed her to Devlin’s shop, using the 90-minute drive to rehearse a  litany of excuses for all the amateurish mistakes. I had butt-joined two lengths of cedar for my port sheer clamp, not realizing that the change in applied torque right at the joint would cause a little kink in the thin 6-mm plywood hull side. My foredeck bowed in the middle, like a Corvette with a suggestive power bulge in its hood. The anxiety was all for nothing. Devlin was inconceivably gracious, poking around the boat with the apparent delight of a boy invited to examine a pile of dinosaur bones. “You made a really nice boat,” he  said. But I felt undeserving, and launched into a list of things I planned to improve, starting with the very amateur finish on the deck. “I wouldn’t bother,” Devlin interrupted right there. “It’s really not important.”

But a couple of months later I bought one more contractor’s pack of sandpaper and spent a week of afternoons in the garage grinding and varnishing, and improved the quality of the deck’s finish by a good 50 percent. It remained obviously an amateur’s effort, but better. It was important, and what I began realizing was that each boatbuilder is entitled to discover his own reasons for the level of quality chosen.

One person might need a boat to generate waves of compliments wherever it docks, although I suspect he or she might not be a lot of fun to be around. Another, like Peter Gron, may need to fulfill a vision—of a boat or of some inner capacity for perseverance and craftsmanship.

For me, the 18-month project gradually had become a matter of looking at my little boat as a larger responsibility.

If a boat is ugly—clunkily proportioned, sloppily detailed, pocked with epoxy leprosy—it’s a form of visual pollution, dishonoring human intelligence and squandering the materials that went into it. If it’s beautiful, it leaves ripples of pleasure in its wake, enhancing life on earth in some small way. The presence of beauty makes a difference in the quality of life for all humanity.

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 25, 2008

he soul of a city resides in its human culture, not its historic buildings. But those buildings serve to remind the changing cast of human characters what that soul is made of, and keep it from mutating beyond recognition.

The Ballard Denny’s, a mildly amusing curio that’s worth about a tenth the attention showered on it over the past six months, is helpful mainly in reminding us of the long-standing threat of cultural Californication. Its style is Californian to the core, both in historical origin and spirit. It says nothing about Seattle. Most likely the underlying reason it stoked such a historic-preservation tussle is that Ballard residents rightly dreaded another dreary condo building arising in its place.

More important to Seattle’s identity are a pair of major historic buildings that have been slowly undergoing renovation and residential “repurposing,” in the historic-prez buzzword, for years: Queen Anne High School and the old Rainier Brewery. The results are mixed, but it’s good for Seattle that they’re staying around.

An architect named James Stephen designed Queen Anne in a restrained version of the Beaux-Arts style that dominated grand public architecture at the turn of the 20th century. Stephen, who settled in Seattle in 1889, was a correspondence-school architect, which wasn’t uncommon at the time, and clearly he was a gifted one.

Wounded fans of the Ballard Denny’s will point out that the school’s style, a fussy and formal European import, has nothing to do with Seattle’s culture. Au contraire: the building’s nobility and vivid ambition speaks volumes about how a young Seattle in 1909 envisioned its future. And regionalism hadn’t yet arisen in most parts of the country, including here. Every building in early 20th-century Seattle drew its inspiration from somewhere else.

The lesson of Queen Anne today is to demonstrate how a big building can feel intimidating as you approach it, but not alienating. There’s a difference. Alienation, over time, only grows more bitter. Intimidation can mellow into respect, even adoration.    The school shuttered in 1981, morphed into apartments in 1986, and began a round of condo renovations in 2006. The third and final phase, just completed, offers a redo of the 1955 Industrial Arts Annex in back into 16 living units.

Like nearly every school addition of the time, the Bauhaus-inspired annex is outrageously disrespectful of the mother building, and it would have been noble, though hardly practical, had the developer ripped it out and planted a park in its place. Its boxy interior, though, has yielded nice condos. The 526-square-foot studios are splashed with natural light, and design details like the concrete floor tiles and steel-cable stair railings evoke Bauhaus spirit without the in-your-face industrial attitude of many loft conversions.

The old Rainier Brewery is a work-in-fitful-progress, years behind schedule into its announced conversion into artists’ live-work lofts, rehearsal spaces and performance venues. But some residents have now moved in, and the renovation process is so complex that it’s worth an interim visit.

Pieces of the jumbled complex date from 1878. There’s no coherent architectural style to speak of, but there are some intriguing details to remind us of a time when industrial buildings strove to look humane, even when the working conditions weren’t.

There’s a graceful cornice line of bricks laid as inverted-pyramid pendants. You can pick out the ghosts of keystone-arch windows and doors, long ago filled in. There’s a cluttered and bumpy rhythm to the massing of the buildings that suggests restless, improvisatory industry—an appropriate symbol for an urban artists’ community.

But it’s hard to imagine a tougher location—30 feet from an I-5 off-ramp—and building type for residential conversion. There are bewildering, labyrinthine corridors, deep, bleak canyons between buildings, and little opportunity to carve out warm, inviting spaces.

Musician Tony Gale, who inhabits a space with an 18-foot-high ceiling and an eye-level view of the freeway through his east windows, admits that the visual and aural commotion drives him nuts. His fix will be to glass-block the windows. The attraction of the brewery, he says, is the creative juice that the place stirs up. “As soon as I saw the promo picture, it said to me: ‘You’re living in one of the most creative spots in Seattle—you have to produce.’”

His brother, Conan Gale, is the property manager and an 18-year veteran of converted-warehouse living; he hardly notices the freeway bedlam and he even invited neighborhood graffiti artists to come in and decorate two walls of his own loft. He says the building’s very toughness fosters a creative community.

“We’re pioneers, we’re roughing it,” he says. “We develop bonds because we have a common adversary—the building! Short of a nuclear power plant, there’s nothing that would take more effort to convert than this.”

Agreed. And so it’s not surprising that the conversion seems only partly satisfying.

The paint job, which recalls (for some of us) psychedelic album covers of the 1960s,  effectively landmarks the building in a freeway-eye view. Up close, though, it’s shabby and cartoonish, and you wish that a century’s encrusted paint could be blasted off to expose the color and texture of the original brick. The interior spaces are bare-knuckled and raw, about as industrial-chic as, well, an old beer factory. It’s obvious that this is no champagne-budget production.

But here’s why we should be grateful anyway: if a developer were to throw $30 million into it—a mildly educated guess as to what a showcase renovation might cost—few artists would be able to afford the rent. And the project would then be eroding Seattle’s human culture even as it preserved the bricks and mortar of a once-diverse city.

 Seattle Post-intelligencer, March 4, 2008

eattle has the townhouse pox. A rash of trite, stale, and clumsy faux-Craftsman eightplexes is ripping through the city’s neighborhoods, bleeding vitality and visual interest out of the streetscapes.

Some at least offer the virtue of low price—that’s relatively “low” in the pathology of Seattle’s real estate—but we’re trading short-term affordability for long-haul blight.

Architects and neighborhood advocates are worrying aloud. “People are going to get turned off to density by equating it to all these bad examples,” says John DeForest, who founded the Northwest chapter of the Congress of Residential Architects. “There’s an urgent need to put more good alternatives out there.”

Former City Councilman and architect Peter Steinbrueck goes straight to the projects’ typical worst feature—the driveway or “auto court” that bisects the eightplexes to provide access to garages and frequently main entrances as well. “Who wants to look into these narrow, dark, paved-over spaces? They’re like tenements, and it doesn’t even matter whether they dress them up with this faux-Craftsman crap.”

The auto courts are decidedly dreary and barren, but the problems don’t end there. Typically, the standard design carves out a miniature parcel of privacy for each resident by butting a fence up to the sidewalk, an unfriendly gesture that establishes a stark division between public and private space. It’s not a recipe for neighborhood-building.

And the relentless repetition of the formula—three stories, bay windows, steeply pitched roof and a perfunctory nod to Craftsman detailing, with eave brackets or a patch of cedar shingles—is increasingly rendering Seattle streetscapes as monotonous as robo-designed suburban developments. Check out Stone Avenue from Northeast 85th to 90th Street.

Seattle’s multi-family housing code, which Steinbrueck says is in dire need of a thorough renovation, actually encourages the formula. Developers cop bonuses for bay windows and pitched roofs. In a typical mid-density zone, a builder gets to rise to 30 feet with a pitched roof, but only 25 if it’s flat. The intention is good—to allow more light to squeeze into the gaps between buildings—but the unintended consequence is a droning rhythm of identical forms poking the sky, block after boring block.

The good news is that a handful of architects and developers are defying the   dismal standard, demonstrating some of the “good alternatives” DeForest advocates. They’re more interesting, more neighborly, greener—and, sigh, invariably more expensive.

PB Elemental, a Seattle design-build firm, has squeezed several intriguing small townhouse projects onto very tight city lots, and its best yet is a new fiveplex in the South Park neighborhood at 816 S. Cloverdale St. Four of the units are priced at $325,000 to $350,000. That undercuts the typical two- or three-bedroom Craftsman townhouse, but these are one-bedroom lofts of just 776 square feet.

But the Cloverdale project has several engaging design features that should raise value both for the future residents and the neighborhood. Instead of the awful auto court, all the parking is in the open, off the alley. The two front units feature glazed garage door-like roll-up walls that open onto sunken courtyards, extending the compact living space outdoors. There’s a sidewalk fence, but because the yards are sunken, the fences are low, providing a reasonable compromise between privacy and openness. The building’s form is a basic modern box, but a veneer of horizontal cedar planks adds a buzz of warmth to the street elevation.

Developer Dean Guske and Eggleston/Farkas Architects have built a more defiantly modern project on a more difficult Ballard lot. The seven $450,000 units at 1420-24 NW 64th St. rest on ground-floor concrete bases and greet the street with a mood of boxy but appealing confidence. Lacking an alley, Eggleston/Farkas had to shoehorn in an auto court and single-car garages. That created a dead-space view for the back units, and erased any opportunity for useful outdoor space for the front ones.

Why not shunt the parking underground? “Wild guess—another $75,000 per unit,” Guske said. “If you did something like that, you’d end up with a better product. But you probably won’t do it very many times because you won’t make any money.”

The Dwelling Company, however, has done just that in a high-end Bellevue rowhouse project at 1200 Bellevue Way, designed by Freiheit & Ho Architects of Kirkland. Cars and storage closets are tucked away below the complex, which radiates the innocent purity of a romanticized 19th-century urban neighborhood. There’s no concrete wasteland, no clutter, an interior courtyard that suggests the epitome of neighborliness, and the air of uptight orderliness that Bellevue seems to treasure. The price ranges from $695,000 for 1,575 square feet to $925,000 for 2,200 square feet.

This project’s problem is its rigid uniformity—49 houses of unvarying color and form is at least 45 too many. It’s trying to transplant the urban texture of the tall, skinny rowhouses of San Francisco or Boston without the character that derives from quirky individual designs. But the concept of rowhouses with underground parking is a good one that Seattle should explore.

There’s one more intriguing idea now taking shape at Pine Street and 19th Avenue Northeast, a seven-unit “urban canyon” by developer Graham Black and b9 Architects. It’s a complicated collision of shed and box forms, some clad in reclaimed fir siding from a deconstructed Fort Lewis barracks. There’s an alluring spatial hubbub; you can’t figure it all out from the street. The parking is at a back corner of the lot, so the zigzag space between the buildings is free to serve as a landscaped canyon-floor pedestrian zone.

And this project highlights the point of the urban experience. It isn’t merely the  density of population that makes possible a certain level of culture—French bistros and art-film festivals. It’s the richness of experience, the intrigue of not knowing what you’ll see around the next corner. This unpredictability is what’s missing from most of the proliferating townhouse clumps. What you see is all you get.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 29, 2008

rchitecture, like food and fashion, cycles through phases, and not all of them are endearing. A particularly low moment—actually an agonizing 30 years—was 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 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 not a lot less 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 5th Avenue side and a pocket park, open to the public, wedged into the 60 feet between it and Union Bank (now renamed 901 5th Avenue).

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 901 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 ornament 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 has parted just enough to expose a brilliant cantaloupe 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.

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 currently under construction downtown, and there are 25 more undergoing permitting or design review.

When the view consists mainly or entirely of the other members of the thicket, 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 is also 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 and looking up at 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’s 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.

Arizona Highways, January 2008

rop almost any architect into the unfamiliar, seemingly hostile environment of the Sonoran Desert, and his instinctive reaction will be to design something defensive—something to fend off the scorching sun, keep the critters at bay, and swaddle the building’s occupants in a wrap of psychological comfort by reminding them of a softer, more civilized land.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s reaction, which began taking shape in the desert north of Scottsdale 70 years ago, was nothing of the sort. It was nothing of any sort ever seen before. Taliesin West had no antecedent in the history of architecture, and even in Wright’s own career the only rehearsal for it was a cluster of tent-like cabins built nine years earlier south of Phoenix. Taliesin West is not only Wright’s most original work, it may also be his greatest—fearless, beautiful, embracing a whole philosophical world, and bonded almost spiritually to its setting.

“Taliesin West, to me, is a place that came right out of his gut,” says Vern Swaback, a Scottsdale architect who apprenticed with Wright in 1957 and lived in the Taliesin Fellowship for the next 22 years. “What he wrote later was just concocted to explain it to the public. I think the desert just spoke to him, and he created something right for it.”

Wright first visited Arizona from Wisconsin in 1928 to “consult” on the textile block construction of the Arizona Biltmore. Albert Chase McArthur, who had begun his career as a draftsman in Wright’s Oak Park, Illinois, office in 1907, was the architect. Wright’s Olympian ego rendered him spectacularly unsuited as a consultant to anyone, and the relationship lasted just four months. The elegant guest cottages are likely Wright’s design; the main building is McArthur’s. More significantly, Wright’s first Arizona winter led to a relationship with another would-be hotel developer, Alexander Chandler, who hired him to design a world-class resort on the southern slope of what is now Phoenix’s South Mountain Park.

Wright and an entourage of family and draftsmen returned to Arizona in 1929 to design the hotel. Instead of renting apartments, they quickly cobbled up a desert camp that Wright called “Ocatillo,” misspelling the name of the spidery, flowering shrub that flourished on the site. It consisted of 15 wood cabins with asymmetrical white canvas roofs and scarlet flaps in lieu of windows. Wright claimed to love the “agreeable diffusion of light” that the translucent canvas afforded, but it was also economic necessity—he was broke, as usual. Still, the cabins accomplished something that no non-Indian architecture in the Southwest had done before: they harmonized with the land by abstracting nature’s own forms, the pointy ridgelines and slopes of the camp’s mountain backdrop.

The resort erupted from Wright’s pencils as nothing less than a complete design vocabulary and ethic for desert architecture, but the stock market crash of October 1929 demolished Chandler’s fortune. The hotel wasn’t built, Wright saw only $2,500 of his $40,000 fee, and local Indians—Wright assumed this, at least—carted off Ocatilla’s remains for shelter or firewood. But a potent seed had germinated.  Camping in the desert for five months had infused Wright with that “gut” feeling for the landscape. “The spiritual cathartic that was the desert worked—swept the spirit clean of stagnant ways and habitual forms ready for fresh adventure,” he wrote. That adventure would be Taliesin West.

Back in Wisconsin, Wright contracted pneumonia during the winter of 1935-36, and a physician told his wife, Olgivanna, that if he would migrate to Arizona every winter it would prolong his life by 20 years. Since Wright was already 68, this was either kindly optimism or eerie prescience. (He lived 23 more years, the most productive of his life.) The following December the Wrights trundled to Phoenix to prospect for land, and in January of 1938 they bought acreage at the foot of a small mountain 10 miles north of Scottsdale. The isolation was essential; Wright reviled cities as “vampires,” “tumors” and “monster leviathans.” No utilities or water—no problem. Wright hired a driller to sink a well—the gamble paid off at the frightening depth of 478 feet—and wired the fellowship back in Wisconsin to:

 … BRING SHOVELS, RAKES, HOES, AND ALSO HOSE. EIGHTEEN DRAFTING BOARDS AND TOOLS … OIL STOVES FOR COOKING AND HEATING, WATER HEATER, VIOLA, CELLO, RUGS NOT IN USE AND WHATEVER ELSE WE NEED.

Wright set up the drafting tables on the site, drawing on brown butcher paper to cut the glare. His “boys,” the apprentices in his private architecture school, provided most of the construction labor. Everyone, Mr. and Mrs. Wright included, camped onsite. Apprentice Cornelia Brierly, decidedly female but still regarded as one of the “boys,” recalled that pack rats would whisk away her jewelry, trading the shiny pieces for pebbles. Mustangs would brush against the tents in the night, and mountain lions would slip into camp to drink water. “One dry summer during the war, when our buildings were still quite open, a starved cow wandered into the open-air kitchen and ate the ration books lying on the counter,” Brierly reported. “The story made the newspapers as the best excuse offered to the Ration Board for the loss of a ration book.”

Wright never conceived of Taliesin West as a luxurious winter retreat. It was a camp, intended to provide modest shelter from the elements while remaining quite open to landscape and sky. There were no glass windows until 1945—the living quarters had canvas flaps and the great drafting studio was essentially a pavilion, open to the sun, bugs and dust. It was also an experimental laboratory for his ideas about architecture and the desert. He ordered changes incessantly. “You could almost hear his brain whirring,” recalls Arnold Roy, who joined the fellowship in 1952. “He’d say, ‘Boys, let’s do this—’ And the concrete would fly.”

The compound’s design grew out of its site, literally and metaphorically. As perhaps befits a camp, there was no foundation—the buildings rest on the natural caliche just beneath the desert sand. (Caliche, a natural deposit of calcium carbonate common in deserts, essentially is cement.) For the walls, Wright had his “boys” raid the site for its colorful quartzite boulders and mine the arroyos for sand. Wright would orchestrate the precise placement of the boulders in the plywood forms, then cement would be poured around them. The walls cost almost nothing and harmonized exquisitely with the surrounding landscape. Frugality was ever the watchword. Once a wall was in place, the apprentices would break down the forms and re-use them. “When the pieces finally got too small, we’d burn them in a 50-gallon drum to keep warm,” recalls Roy.

In a typical trumpet blast of grandiosity, Wright wrote in An Autobiography that “Our new desert camp belonged to the Arizona desert as though it had stood there during creation.” But this wasn’t an empty boast. Taliesin West is perhaps more intimately connected to its landscape and environment than any building on earth. It doesn’t only adopt texture and color from its surroundings. Its wedge-like forms abstract the mountains around it. The horizontal grooves in its walls evoke the erosion lines in desert canyons, and also create interplay of sun and shadow. The fin-like trusses elbowed over the drafting studio give the entire compound a defensive posture, like the body armor of a horned lizard, and yet on a winter evening when pink streaks rake the sky overhead, the armor melts into the heavens. This precisely reflects Wright’s vision of the desert as a duality of intense hostility, where “everything is ready to fight everything else,” and ineffable beauty, “all beyond reach of the finite mind.”

Of course the compound was, and is, dysfunctional. The roofs leaked in the 1930s; after many modifications they leak today. (The rain gutters in the Wrights’ living room run inside, under the ceiling.) The big redwood crossbeams of the pergola, a dramatic walkway between the drafting studio and garden court, were originally only six feet high; taller people were continually ducking and bumping. (After Wright’s death the “boys” raised them eight inches.) Taliesin West is decidedly no green building; electricity bills in summer are so high—about $10,000 a month—that the Fellowship is thinking about buying a fuel cell to generate their own power.

Even if he were here today, and had absorbed a bit of the 21st century’s conservation consciousness, Wright would be uninterested in these complaints. Taliesin West was a demonstration of an ethic that remains as radical today as it was in 1938. A building, Wright was showing us, shouldn’t be a refuge from nature. It should be a means to enhance human interaction with nature. Quality of life isn’t a function of comfort, it’s about richness of experience.

Here’s an example: the drafting studio’s roof is translucent. Originally canvas, today’s acrylic panels admit a similar quality of light. When a cloud lazes across the sun, the mood of the room suddenly changes, like one of those startling major-to-parallel-minor key shifts in a Schubert sonata. Most architects, then or now, would say that light in any work room should be controlled and consistent. But spend an afternoon in Wright’s studio, and you begin to think differently: Maybe work should be affected by emotion and a connection to the cadences of nature. We are not, after all, machines.

Wright talked and wrote incessantly about “organic architecture,” but his words and sentences could seem maddeningly slippery. Taliesin West, though, demonstrates precisely what he meant. It’s the complete integration of architecture, nature and human life—so complete, in fact, that it’s not a matter of architectural style at all. It’s a whole  philosophical system, a Utopia both aesthetic and social.

This is why Taliesin West, despite its universally admired beauty, has had little influence on the way we’ve built Arizona over the last 70 years. A few architects and buildings have learned from the way it physically relates to its landscape. Tucson architect Les Wallach’s Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior doesn’t look anything like a Wright building, but it folds into its site with consummate respect and grace. Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson, designed by FHMB of San Francisco in the early 1980s, echoes the craggy character of the mountain behind it, much as Wright might have done it. But these are isolated examples. Wright’s admirers and disciples believe Taliesin West could, and should, exert more influence.

Swaback, now an architect in private practice in Scottsdale, has been orchestrating Taliesin West’s transformation from a kind of living museum to a center for inspiration and study centered around Wright’s ideas. He lived with the Fellowship, alternating between the original Taliesin in Wisconsin and the winter camp in Scottsdale, for 22 years. The experience left him with the “unquenchable desire” to look for ways to integrate life, work, architecture and nature, he says. And looking at the world’s increasing population and dwindling energy supplies, “The notion of embracing the fact that you’re going to be affected by weather is something that’s ahead of us somewhere.”

Arnold Roy, who still lives in one of the apartments at Taliesin West and conducts his own architectural practice in Wright’s drafting studio, says his life has been immeasurably enriched by living in an environment “where there’s beauty everywhere you look.” And something deeper. “It’s been an opportunity to reflect and think about how things might be in the world if people had the courage, as Mr. Wright did, to act on their ideas.”

Indianapolis Star, December 9, 2007

gainst all odds and logic, the new Central Library’s appalling trail of botched construction, mind-boggling cost overruns, preposterous delays and volleying lawsuits has led to a stunningly good building.

It’s beautiful on the outside, dramatic inside in places where theatrics don’t sabotage its practical mission, and more than adequately respectful of the 1917 Paul Cret building that it kisses on the backside. But the best part of the architecture story here isn’t about space or form or style. It’s about how the new Evans Woollen-designed wing symbolically engages the outside world instead of forming a refuge from it.

It’s a renovation of the role of the public library, an outfitting for a future in which paper-and-ink books and  periodicals may seem as quaintly irrelevant as the typewriter and card catalog embalmed in transparent time capsules in the new building’s floor.

The star architects who designed the sizzling new downtown libraries in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Vancouver and Seattle all tried likewise to address this future that no one, librarians included, can accurately predict. But none of them came up with a building that simply feels as good to spend the day in as Indy’s.

About 80 percent of the Central Library patrons, the staff predicts, will park in the underground garage and shoot into the new building via the elevators to the atrium. But the more revealing route—and the way we’re going to do it here—is to face the complex head-on from the American Legion Mall, then walk up the formal steps into the south entrance on St. Clair Street.

Woollen’s decision not to cuddle up to the Cret building with a neo-neoclassical addition was exactly right. First, it would have been impossible to do it without the risk of unintended mockery. (If we learned one lesson from architecture’s lost weekend of postmodernism, it’s this.)

Second—though Woollen never could have said this in public, even if he believes it—the 1917 library is an important building, but not a great one. It didn’t advance the art of architecture or the science of library design. A new building needed to assert more ambition and activate the city’s urbanity without leaping up in self-congratulatory bombast, which would have seemed to ridicule the old building and its culture.

Woollen deftly avoided that hazard. The concave glass façade forms a bookend to the mall and a perfect picture frame for the Cret building, and it’s quiet and formal enough that it doesn’t scratch and claw at the mall’s historic composure. But its curve still heralds a clean break with the past, a declaration that the lockstep march of classicism ends right here. A flat glass façade would have seemed dull and inert, devoid of the symbolic energy of the curve.

Up the grand steps and inside, and you’ll see how Cret’s dramatic staging of architectural space has been first preserved, then amplified. The narrow vestibule has been retained just as it was, and there’s still that exhilarating explosion of space when you step into the Simon Reading Room. This room, and the flanking east and west reading rooms (now housing the library’s fiction collection) were designed to impress library patrons with the nobility of the printed word, and they still do. Sit down with a book, and you feel cocooned in the presence of a collective culture greater than yourself.

Then take the next step into the glass atrium, and the sacramental air evaporates. A sculptural parasol shaped like a tuba’s bell erupts over the information booth. There’s glass all around, and a jazzy forest of pipes bent into parabolic arches to hold up the transparent ceiling. Instead of the carefully edited allowances of daylight in the Cret rooms, sun and cloud patterns gush into the atrium, and shadows print a mottled complexion on the arches that becomes part of the architecture—which is continuously changing.

But what’s an indoor park doing in a library? It’s 7,000 prodigiously expensive square feet that could have translated into tons of new books. It might inspire people to feel good about themselves, or about Indianapolis, but what does it have to do with the mission of a library?

Here’s where the future comes into play. When we can do any research on a laptop at home in the den, and download e-books that are as readable as ink on paper—almost at hand right now—then the public library becomes irrelevant unless it works as a place that generates community, a church of information where people come for interactive enlightenment. It’s impossible to imagine what forms this may take, but the Central Library is now a stage set where anything can happen. The alternative future in which we all read and learn in isolation seems unimaginably bleak.

The heart of the new building is the six-story wing housing the Learning Curve (the children and young adults’ floor), the nonfiction stacks, and special collections. These floors are also awash in daylight, more than any 1917 library ever dreamed of offering. The floor-to-ceiling curtain walls on the south side offer dramatic views of the mall, the city skyline, and the weather. The sensations, and maybe the psychology, of reading or working here is diametrically different from that of the Cret reading rooms: you sense connections instead of shelter. The library is no longer a retreat; it’s an observatory.

The variety of spaces and furnishings will accommodate a lot of different needs, physical and emotional. The sheer quality is impressive—leather armchairs and granite-topped tables for lounge seating, Herman Miller Aeron chairs (figure $750 each, retail) for the work tables and study rooms. The pre-teen zone on the second floor provides rolling coves that look like giant aluminum eggs and shelter three or four readers inside—an imaginative way to give kids intimate nests in a vast building that could otherwise seem overwhelming.

In any project this complex there are going to be design issues that didn’t get resolved, and the Central Library is no exception. Just before the opening, the staff planned to drape five-foot-wide nylon banners down the east and west walls of the atrium because they’d discovered—late in the game, incredibly—that the convex wall caromed too much sun into the room in the mornings and afternoons. Sun-filtering glass would have been a happier solution.

The public computer stations, 16 to 36 on each floor, are butted together in long and dreary rows as if for typists in a data-processing sweatshop. It’s a highly imperfect solution to the delicate problem of patrons surfing porn sites: if the users are huddled together, the library figures, there’ll be a self-censoring effect. But whatever you’re researching, these are tight and unattractive places to work.

And if you venture a closeup look on the outside where the old and new buildings smack together, you’ll witness a shotgun marriage, cobbled up without much care for the formalities. It’s a minor flaw, but it stands out because the interior details are so carefully considered.

It’s fair, of course, to Indianapolis to stay ticked off at the costly muddle that produced this building, and to keep pawing through the legal debris for culprits. But at the same time, the results call for an unrestrained whoop of joy. The architecture now welcomes the future instead of celebrating ancient glories. It raises the bar for Indianapolis’s 21st-century downtown. It’s easy to navigate and it feels good everywhere you go in it. There isn’t much more you can ask of a library, or of the art of architecture.

Arizona Highways, February 2008

s crime scenes go, Lake Powell is so staggeringly beautiful that it is hard to hold in the lock of your mind that you are supposed to be appalled by it. Even Edward Abbey got himself grudgingly seduced: “Though not a lake, [it] may well be as its defenders assert the most beautiful reservoir in the world.” The Sierra Club’s David Brower likewise slipped during a boat trip staged by writer John McPhee: “You can’t duplicate this experience—this lake—anywhere else,” Brower admitted.

I am spending five days on Lake Powell in a kayak, nominally to scribble a travel story for another magazine, but I am gnawing on a deeper personal agenda that I haven’t shared with the five other members of our plastic flotilla. In a micro-boycott to honor my environmental ethic, I never came here in the quarter-century that I lived in Arizona. I believed then, and now, that we humans hold a moral responsibility to tread as lightly as possible on the earth. How can anyone reconcile that principle with the colossal bootprint of this desert lake?

This is a dilemma that overflows the borders of a travel story, which is why I am finally wringing it out here. It is worth visiting Lake Powell solely to consider the rightness or wrongness of its existence. The conjunctions of nature and civilization are among the most powerful issues of our time, and they are becoming more pressing as the planet grows more crowded and our uses of its resources more daring. Lake Powell, though nearly 50 years old now, is perhaps the most radical and controversial transformation of a landscape ever undertaken by humankind.

The idea of man-made lakes first occurred some 4,000 years ago, when small reservoirs for drinking water and irrigation arosefirst appeared in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. But these were little more than beaver dams that happened to be built by two-legged land mammals. The great reservoir boom had to wait for concrete (huge earthen dams tended to spectacular and lethal failures) and in North America, the advent of the New Deal and its public works ambitions. With the completion of Hoover Dam in 1935, the second of six stoppers along the Colorado River in Arizona, an era of titanic dams—and the vast reservoirs behind them—was in full bloom.

Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell, was unique because the landscape upstream from it was no everyday desert basin. It was a labyrinth of crinkly canyons, some as dark and foreboding as dungeons, others as dramatic as gothic cathedrals, all punctuated with occasional waterfalls and sudden splashes of sunlit Gambel oaks and willows. Abbey, who wrote a chapter of Desert Solitaire about his rubber raft trip through the canyon before the lake backed into it, concluded that “here was an Eden, a portion of the earth’s original paradise.”

The dam’s raison d’etre, strangely, is murky. The Bureau of Reclamation sold it to Congress as a means of hoarding Colorado River water for irrigation and a cash cow of hydroelectric power. But Arizona and Utah also saw it as a catalyst for tourism in massive numbers, which Glen Canyon’s wilderness had not encouraged. After the lake arose, its unique beauty seemed to overwrite all other considerations. A  brochure authored by Floyd Dominy, the Bureau’s commissioner from 1959 to 1969, is empurpled with prose likely not matched by any bureaucrat in modern times: “Colors like a symphony of Nature’s music … a front-row seat in an amphitheater of infinity … a oneness with the world and God.”

But the lake has not forged a oneness of opinion. Countless writers have seconded Abbey’s alternating heartbreak and fury over the loss of Glen Canyon, and in 1997 a Salt Lake City physician, Dr. Richard Ingebretsen, formed the Glen Canyon Institute with the ultimate goal of draining the lake. Perhaps the most remarkable second thought about the lake came from Arizona’s rock-ribbed Republican senator, who said in 1976 that of all his Senate votes, the one he would most want to change “was a vote I cast to construct Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.” Goldwater was remembering the river he had visited in 1940, apparently gone forever.

rizona is a land of audacious schemes, partly because it is young and open, and also because the outrageous landscape seems to provoke us into competing with it. More than a millenium ago the Hohokam created the largest canal system in prehistoric North America in the valley that now cradles Phoenix. On the modern Colorado Plateau, artist James Turrell has spent more than a quarter-century remaking a volcanic crater into an experiential celestial observatory. Metro Phoenix, an oasis supporting four million people, is an audacious act of faith in a desert basin that enjoys eight inches of rainfall a year.

Most of our schemes alter the landscape. Some respectfully: the prehistoric Sinagua pueblo of Tuzigoot crowns a Verde Valley hill so gracefully that Nature herself could have arranged the rock walls. And some not: modern homes perch on the slopes of Phoenix’s Camelback Mountain and Tucson’s Santa Catalinas, each making its personal architectural statement, and the cumulative effect is grandly scaled clutter.

It’s wrong to imagine that prehistoric Native Americans were more enlightened custodians of the land than we are. Pueblo architecture flows with the mood and shape of the land only because of its builders’ limitations. They couldn’t truck in materials from distant places; they had to fashion their architecture out of whatever the site provided: sandstone, clay, pine. Tuzigoot and similar pueblos probably assumed their tight, clustered forms from the necessity of defense. Modern hillside homes, widely separated on acre-sized lots, grow out of a different human need—the yearning for privacy.

Whatever the reasons behind it, transforming landscape is what our species does. At whatever level the technology of the moment allows, we build roads, bridges, dams, canals, fences, fortifications and houses. The Hohokam built vast earthen mounds and scooped out ball courts; we move dirt likewise to sculpt golf courses and level parking lots.

These ambitions are as legitimate a part of our nature as building nests is for eagles or burrowing is for ground squirrels. Every living organism’s biological imperative is to exploit its environment, to maximize opportunity. For better or worse, we humans are equipped to make more of this mandate than any other species.

We are also uniquely equipped to predict the consequences of what we’re considering doing, and we haven’t used this feature of our brains very well. That, I think, is the unspoken issue at the heart of the Lake Powell trouble. John McPhee poked at it in Encounters with the Archdruid: “possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers.” Lake Powell is more than a metaphor. It is a summary of modern technology’s nearly unlimited power to revise nature, and its opponents fear that it stands as a precedent. Draining the lake, on the other hand, would become an equally monumental but opposite symbol: a scaling back of human aspirations, a recognition that the human species is only part of a much larger community of life on earth, over which opposible thumbs do not automatically give us dominion.

That’s a seductive idea for someone who believes that our species needs a booster shot of humility, which I do. The problem is that when applied to Lake Powell, it would disregard the human capacity for creating beauty, which is another part of our biological uniqueness. We are rearranging nature whenever we design a garden, build a house, sculpt a figure out of stone or wood, or even make a painting (canvas is a rearrangement of tree fibers and pigments derive from minerals). If Lake Powell is, as Abbey thought, “the most beautiful reservoir in the world,” then it also serves as a stunning example of success. Most of our meddling with nature, from suburban lawns to other man-made lakes, is not as meritorious.

Of course, Lake Powell’s beauty is based on what was there before: the spectacular canyons and slickrock shelves. The spectacle that transfixes us today is the starkly dramatic juxtaposition of pink stone, sapphire sky and turquoise water, all on a scale never before seen in a desert. And yes, a place precious and irreplaceable has been drowned underneath it. How to weigh the value of each against the other?

One of my fellow kayakers throws out a provocative thought as we fabricate a camp in a stony half-bowl embracing a bay. “If this were natural,” he says, “no one would ever think anything other than that it’s fabulous.” Why, then, condemn it for its human-engineered origins? Or to ask the question one step deeper: why is a lake unnatural when it was created by creatures who are, unquestionably, part of nature?

Behind our camp, the moon rides over a ring of serrated bluffs. Its white light, cold and sharp as ice, renders the red mountains into silhouettes that glow with vague menace, like charcoal hoarding a secret fire. Then intimations of lightning begin flashing on the southern horizon, and for the next two hours we watch—warily—as a late-summer thunderstorm scribes a half-circle around us. Faint orange virgas scratch the sky, but the rain never finds the ground—a reminder that despite the 27 million acre-feet of water beside us, we are in the desert.

Possibly we humans have a legitimate role to play in this grand scene, or possibly we have already improvised beyond what the desert’s script will tolerate. Lake Powell eventually will prove to be a dramatic example of what we should or should not do. All I know for sure is that in this flicker of geologic time, I am in one of the most beautiful places on earth, no longer appalled.