![]() The Seattle Municipal Tower, tucked behind Columbia Center, unmistakably bears the appearance of a circumcised penis but lacks the slightest sense of humor about it. The 76-story Columbia Center on Fifth Avenue is a thick, bland thug, and the stubby double trapezoids of the Sedgwick James Building in northern downtown-both were built by the charging developer Martin Selig-look like Columbia Center's evildoing sidekicks. Most of Seattle's biggest towers are anonymous and forgettable, or bad. Even though the Needle represents the false heart and trampling feet of tourism, it is nevertheless a little city's dream set down in charming angles, and personality matters. Seattle is a sentimental favorite, for structures like the Space Needle, which is less than two-thirds as tall as Seattle's tallest building. Height is not the badge of quality the race to the top has left these shores. Seattle's overall skyline ranks around 45th in the world according to calculations of height and density (along with the likes of Dallas and Philadelphia), but in popularity polls, Seattle's skyline lands in the top dozen in the world. ![]() Meanwhile, Smith Tower and Seattle Tower rank 16th and 36th in height in Seattle, respectively. At Third Avenue and University Street, Seattle Tower is an art-deco beacon, the color of its bricks lightening subtly toward the sky, in a design taken from Eliel Saarinen's second-place proposal in the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition. Thanks to the preservation of the low historic district Pioneer Square, the Smith Tower-which architect Walter Schacht thinks of as a Victorian lady trailing her bustle-dominates its own skyline. ![]() Maybe that explains the almost universal adoration for Seattle's smallest high-rises the 1914 Smith Tower and the 1928 Northern Life Tower, now called Seattle Tower, are easily the best skyscrapers in the city. How, then, to gauge the success of a skyline any longer? By whether it is the target of a terrorist plot? By whether it is not? As early as 1913, Cass Gilbert, designer of the Woolworth Building in New York, admitted that the skyscraper is "a machine that makes the land pay." After September 11, American skyscrapers have become not only unfashionable, but dangerous and shameful artifacts of a preening hubris we no longer want to project to the world. Louis-was a harbinger of this.) The dark side of skyscrapers is ascendant, the exploitative, inhuman side. (Another one of Yamasaki's creations reduced to rubble-a housing project in St. The vaunted nature of skylines has been tarnished by awareness of their environmental, historic, and socioeconomic implications. What was once a blazing symbol of optimistic speculation-the photographer Alfred Stieglitz proclaimed he saw the ship of America charging toward him the first time he set eyes on the Flatiron Building in New York-has become a problematic mess. This is not the time for American skylines. All at once, it became clear that Seattle's arches had nothing to do with science they had been a foreshadowing, and now they were a relic, of a distinctly American zeal undone. They echo the Gothic-arched Twin Tower fragment that famously stood amid the rubble, broadcast around the world as an American ruin. Now, the arches that stand so quietly in Seattle bring it all back in bony, ghostly form: the idealism, yes, but also the egotism and the wreckage. They were so celebrated, in fact, that they attracted the attention of the Port Authority of New York, which just that year had settled on a Lower Manhattan parcel of land for the city's World Trade Center, and invited Yamasaki to submit a design. ![]() They're among the beauties of the Seattle skyline, and when they went up, they were monuments to idealism by the homegrown modernist architect. Science Pavilion, which later became Pacific Science Center. They're easy to overlook, but there they are, well below the Space Needle, hidden in plain sight: the white Gothic arches that Minoru Yamasaki created for the 1962 World's Fair U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |