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Seattle, Washington
And the needle touched down, the needle is landing
Rem Koolhaas' library is still right where I left it three years ago and is still a building that needs to be seen to be believed. After all this time the newness hasn't really worn off although the building admittedly does look a little more lived in. The fatal circulation flaw remains- it's still exceptionally easy (via well marked, up only escalators) to go up but a pain in the ass to get down (either down a set of poorly signed, hard to find fire stairs or via elevators that are located nowhere near where they should have been). You would have thought that some time in the last three years someone would have forced a tweaking of such an issue. Maybe the "this way down" signs are still on order.
Still despite such flaws it remains one of the most important buildings finished in the US in recent memory and easily worth whatever trouble it takes to see it in person. Really.
The big Alaska slideshow doesn't actually start in Alaska (it will get there soon enough) but rather in Seattle. When first planning this year's big trip and pricing the limited available flights (and realizing I'd be stuck on Alaska Airlines no matter options what I tried), I soon decided that it was surprisingly easier (and surprisingly less expensive) to book the cross country flights on my own through Jet Blue and just pick up the rest of the flights from there. Such scheduling tricks allowed me a stopover in Seattle where a quick afternoon was all I really needed to see two new recently opened downtown buildings that I decided I wanted to see.
The first of those two buildings is Brad Cloepfil's addition and working over of the Seattle Art Museum, a (local) landmark building designed by Robert Venturi (see Slide 1I). Venturi's original building took advantage of the site by creating a large, grand staircase that mirrored the hill outside, while inside it was framed with unabashedly post modern arches and littered with sculptures standing on podiums which engaged the stair. Cloepfil's addition leaves that feature of Venturi's design intact but completely cuts it off from the rest of the museum (something which feels unnecessarily cruel), moves the entrance and incorporates Venturi's nondescript upstairs galleries as if the original building never existed. An odd choice and one which makes it difficult to judge the new building completely on its own merits, although it seemed at least competent if not spectacular (and seriously helped by stellar exhibition installations).
As for the art it was surprisingly good. Pictured below is the brand new lobby underneath all of the suspended cars with shooting lights that you (probably) could have ever hoped for.
The Seattle pictures come to an end with the inside of Robert Venturi's grand stairs, now called the Art Ladder but should really be called the Art Ladder to Nowhere. Once the museum's great public space, it is now hard to reach and connects to nothing in the new museum. Regardless of what you think of Venturi, the building or currently unpopular architectural styles, this lack of connection creates an unbelievably lost opportunity.
The new museum's architect Brad Cloepfil (of Allied Works) is also building locally in New York and destroying another unpopular building. The American Craft Museum which changed their name to the Museum of Art and Design (or MAD) bought out the eternally derelict and wacky Two Columbus Circle building designed by Ed Stone and is reworking the building into something completely different. The design has not been without controversy although I always held hope that it would end up better than such protesting suggested, something I am quickly losing faith in. Hopefully I'm wrong on that one.
The other new building I had hoped to see is also part of the Seattle Art Museum but oddly enough not really a building. The Olympic Sculpture Park is located on the northern edge of the downtown waterfront, on land bridging over train tracks and busy roads that connect everything from parks to (borderline) transitional residential neighborhoods. Designed by New York firm Weiss Manfredi, it features a small pavilion or two, a reasonably long bridge, a few areas named after various Microsoft executives and a reasonably spotty collection of contemporary sculptures located throughout its zigzag organizing path. Taken as a whole it has a lot of presence, although truthfully and individually the sculptures are often not quite as strong as you hoped they might be.
The Space Needle is where it's always been, although it does at least look a little bit more fun when seen through Tereita Fernandez's "Seattle Cloud Cover" installation on the bridge over the railway tracks.
Even Frank Gehry himself admits that the Experience Music Center is not his best work (possibly an understatement there), still it does have the ability to allow the potential for a reasonably interesting photo at times.
