Best of 2011: Why does Seattle have so many bleak public spaces?
This city has enough gray in its sky. We don't need more on the ground.
Editor's Note: In the run-up to the new year, Crosscut will be sharing ten days of its best stories from 2011, each with a different theme. Today's theme: Public Spaces.
Seattle is one of the prettiest big cities on the continent, but we didn’t get this way because of our architecture. We had beauty handed to us, as it were, in a blue, green, and snow-rimmed bowl, and all we had to do was not mess it up too much, which apart from certain malicious hits like the Viaduct, we’ve managed decently.
Our landscape-oriented mindset should have been good preparation for what we need in the densifying city now, which is more design intelligence given to the open spaces between buildings — plazas, parklets, and awkward leftovers like the places under freeway overpasses. The more the air space around us becomes stuffed with architecture, the more acutely we need the relief of thoughtfully landscaped open spaces on the ground. Arguably, these spaces are more important in the built environment than most buildings because they’re public — people use them.
Or if they’re emotionally cold, dreary, or austere, people don’t use them, which is the case with a number of Seattle’s precious open spaces. On one of our desperately rare sunny spring days this month, I visited about a dozen open spaces in the dense city and found — no surprise — the bleak ones practically unused and the beautiful ones full of life. What is surprising is that we’re not demanding more graceful, humane, imaginative design — and raising hell over trends such as Seattle Parks and Rec’s inexplicable new fascination with concrete and gravel.
The accompanying slide show illustrates nine unfortunate examples of bleakness in Seattle, with a few words about the specific failure of each. At the end, there are also two examples of excellent public spaces that work.
Before we get there, let’s run through a half-dozen basic principles of urban open-space design — subjective, of course, and fair game for debate and attack:
• It’s not impossible, but it is very tough, to design an attractive small plaza surrounded by big bad buildings. Big good buildings, yes; bad small buildings, possibly. But bigness and badness together present an overwhelming architectural force that’s extremely difficult to redeem.
• Multiple levels relieve tedium, just as a mountainous landscape is inherently more interesting than a prairie. A good plaza, even a small one, has an engaging topography as well as a variety of hardscape textures and botanical colors.
• Lots of trees and flowers help, but they can’t do the job all by themselves.
• Likewise, sculpture and water features alone don’t bring a dull space alive. Classic example: “Hammering Man” works tirelessly but still fails to animate the lifeless corner outside the Seattle Art Museum; the sculpture is interesting but the outdoor room around it is not.
• Cantilevering or propping a big chunk of a building over a plaza, as at the Central Library’s Fourth Avenue entrance, is a way of shrinking a building’s footprint to create more open space. It is usually not a way that makes people feel good about using that space. No matter how reassuring the engineering is, we instinctively feel the oppression of all that weight overhead.
• People do not admire raw concrete — walls, floors, pavement, planters, benches, whatever — nearly as much as design professionals do.
These provocations in mind, let’s take a tour. Click on the slide show at the top of the page to get started.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Dec 22, 8:47 a.m. Inappropriate
Why so bleak? All of the micro reasons Cheek suggests, plus one macro reason: not enough people. When the city threw open the brand new South Lake Union park, it was a beautiful mash-up, one of Seattle's finest moments. I thought the park was the best thing to happen to Seattle in a long time. But on any given day, it is, as Cheek says, an empty gray reflection of the lake and sky. There simply aren't enough people in the park.
Posted Thu, Dec 22, 11:55 a.m. Inappropriate
It's pretty simple. The bleak public open spaces are needed to complement the bleak public buildings.
Our real concern should be that Seattle's prideful claim to be the host of the homeliest collection of public buildings anywhere in the Free World is dangerously at risk. The brash, stunning in-your-face quality of Civic Butt-ugly is slowly being eroded in favor of the murky mindlessness of Municipal Merely Mediocre. It wasn't so very long ago that one could pivot around the Fourth and James intersection sequentially lapping up the squat elegance of the 50's motel-modern City Hall on one corner, the massively totalitarian Public Safety Building downhill to its west, the drab gray superficial faux-classic facade of the County Courthouse south across James, and completing the circle with the indescribably nondescript waffle-cone surfaces of the County Administration Building. Then if you craned your neck a bit, you could see the County Jail fortress (with echoes of its inmates raging at the streets below) further uphill to the east, with the dilapidated County Parking Garage teetering giddily on the southern horizon. May I humbly suggest that (outside the former Soviet Union) there was no pile of public structural crud anywhere to rival this array?
But now, alas, the glory is all beginning to fade away. New bland City Hall, new bland county structures south of the Administration Building, a big hole with a wooden fence around it where the mighty Public Safety Building used to reign. Is our Golden Age of Civic Absurdity over, with nothing suitable to replace it? With the final crumbling of the Viaduct one fears that an era will have passed unnoticed. The old boys at the Rainier Club will be spinning in their graves.
Posted Thu, Dec 22, 2:41 p.m. Inappropriate
Sculpture Park should be on this list of obnoxious failures. Seattle sculptures also stand out as offensive oddities. Hammering Man is a insult to the working class. It portrays laborers as 2-dimensional, featureless flat black wage-slaves embroiled in endless, strenuous, monotonous toil amidst the leisure class. Its long neck suggests a-sexuality; men & women on a chain gang, their aesthetics no more refined than a whirlygig.
A more fitting context is Gas Works Park amidst historic industrial activity and arm-swinging playground. Hammering Man symbolizes how only the elite are allowed entry into the Art Museum. Freaky sculptures and useless parks is how the Seattle elite spit on the lower classes.
Sculpture Park has the soul of a parking garage. The bored tunnel is expected to undermine many dozen downtown buildings, leading to their demolition or very possible sudden collapse in an earthquake. Seattle's developer class are aware of profitable replacement and the mortal danger as they derive income from car dependency and build monuments to the utter stupidity.
Posted Thu, Dec 22, 3:03 p.m. Inappropriate
I recall thinking and then writing on coming to Seattle 15 years ago that it was a city without an eye. Along the waterfront, then, there was a single "vista point", and it was marked as such, a kind of bower, not too far from the Ferry Terminal.
From higher up, at that time, much of the northern part of downtown seemed to be a kind of parking lot city, lots of these
vacant spaces have since been built up. On closer look and walking I found that the "eyelessness", the apparent unavailability of a visual aesthetic, was not quite the case, at least historically; after all there was the Craftsman heritage, very much in original evidence around NE 65, the Ravenna area, which had then been industrially downgraded and copied into the horrors that are now thrown up in Kent and other suburbs; the well to-do had built themselves interesting stuff on Queen Anne and on the slopes of Capitol Hill; there was Pioneer square with what I call its American Mercantile Architecture amongst which I had once happily resided in Manhattan in what is informally known as Duane Park, a triangular affair with assorted building dating back to its Dutch origins and forward to post Civil war factory, a triangle with trees in its center. I also lived through what has been morialized by the photographer Danny Lyons as THE DESTRUCTION OF LOWER MANHATTAN! Far worse than 9/11 was done to that part of the city in the 60s and 70s.
So there had been an eye and styles and some variety in Seattle at one time. How that particular eye had disappeared I tried to account for myself by dwelling on the depression; of cheap runs deep trundling West across the Cascades; the protestant ethic - if no eye was brought from northern Europe, why would it suddenly want to exert itself here? How drably the people dressed - I came from three years in Mexico! How pink white the flesh made baked-potato me nearly wretch! The numerous Mallards says I who now looks like a Male Mallard were more attractively attired. It was June, but no sun ray had touched these folks for years on end! As you looked around at the built-up slopes, say along the Ship Canal [as compared to the birth canal? I wonder even now] the wooden houses and their coloring definitely seemed transportable right back to Scandinavia. If St. Barbara and its Spanish-Moorish architecture make it into too much of an exquisite jewel along the West Coast, but Portland does not seem all that different from Seattle but for it having a real loft district, something that I who likes industrial areas and was the publisher of Jim Stratton's PIONEERING IN THE URBAN WILDERNESS appreciated; here, very little of that utilitarian transformation had taken place. Yes, I found most of the streets amazingly unpeopled, and I wrote two poems about that. Fortunately, Seattle has ample real parks and nature keeps intruding, as do its feathered beasts.
Posted Fri, Dec 23, 5:30 p.m. Inappropriate
Great comment, Wells. I wish it weren't so......
As the author alludes in his first paragraph, it is unfortunate that the curse of natural beauty has led Seattle to operate on the premise that nothing people do could possibly uglify the place. Sadly, people have indeed managed to create vast ugliness here. Look at how Portland, in a less attractive natural setting, has made the best of it, versus Seattle. Let's hope it doesn't always stay this way.
Posted Fri, Dec 23, 5:31 p.m. Inappropriate
UnFortunately, Seattle does NOT have real parks nor much thriving natural settings other than engineered show trees and groomed lawnspots along sea & lakeside borders. Seattler city dwellors have little nature to live amidst. The bored tunnel will undermine many dozen downtown building foundations, leading to their demolition or possible catastrophic collapse in earthquake. And, the damaging alteration of underground water-courses that produce upheaval is permanent.
A 3-lane 'stacked' C/c tunnel 'mates with' dbt's first 1000' slope.
It's not too late.
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