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.

            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