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 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