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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

WHO BUILT WHAT

 

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

Height: 38 stories

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

Developer: R.C. Hedreen Co., Seattle

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

Minus: Fatuous blue glass fins

 

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

Height: 21 stories

Architect: NBBJ, Seattle

Developer: The Seattle Hotel Group LLC

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

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

 

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

Height: 38 stories

Architect: Weber Thompson, Seattle

Developer: Opus Northwest LLC, Minneapolis

Plus: Unique integration of parking and work studios

Minus: Tower meets the sidewalk with a dull thud

 

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

Height: 42/43 stories

Architects: GBD, Portland; Mulvanny G2, Bellevue

Developer: Gerding Edlen, Portland

Plus: Sophisticated and fascinating sculptural form

Minus: Parklet between towers accessible only to residents

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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