Results tagged “architecture”

MyBallard lit up yesterday with the continuing saga of Edith Macefield's house. In the basic facts of the story, the house has been sold to Greg and Shauna Pinneo, owners of some shady outfit which combines real estate investment with "inspiration, motivation, ethics, and expertise"--if one is predisposed to believe the website.

• Giganticasscity has photos and reflections on a rectangular brown house in the Central that may or may not be doing a great job of fitting into the neighborhood.
• Orphan Road is discussing the possibility of distance-based Metro fares ($0.10 for 4 blocks sounds pretty good!).
• White Center Now has a juicy account of yesterday's turn of events, involving public intoxication and the Seattle Police Department.

"the architect is in (ballard) ~ 5 cents!" by MPG

• Ballard, beware! There's a bold thief making his rounds at local businesses, despite being caught red-handed and confronted by a number of his victims.
• It's time for year-end reviews from everyone, about everything! The Southlake has chronicled the big events of its first year of neighborhood blogging.
• Wah-ha-ha (evil blog laugh), "Snowmageddon" spread! Beacon Hill Blog has a fascinating (albeit slow-loading) set of hour-by-hour time-lapsed video from the great snow siege of 2008. As BHB said, it all started out so innocently...but we all know what came next.

We're tied in knots over this. We're already going to what should be a great evening of new works at PNB (Morris, Gaines, Millepied, Forsythe), but if we weren't, nothing could keep us from hearing Mike Davis over at the University of Washington.

"Ugliest Building in Seattle?" by Grundlepuck

"WSTC From 5 Blocks" by Ray Hutchinson

"Reflections on Old Justice" by Jonathan Hanlon

Untitled by Aaron Morris

The intrepid and dedicated bloggers over at My Ballard.com have been providing nearly minute-by-minute coverage of the Seattle Landmark Preservation Societies vote on the old Denny's building on 15th and Market. According to their pain-staking notes, around 6:30 the board's final vote of 6 to 3 in favor of landmark status, was met by gasps and cheers by supporters in the audience. The vote means that the building cannot be demolished and replaced by condos which were already planned for the space.

We hope this isn't a growing trend. From the Croc to the Sunset Bowl to all of Seattle's bars, it seems as though any place of which beer is an integral component is endangered with stifling regulation or closure or even the wrecking ball. The very latest, of course, is a portion of the old Georgetown brewery just a scant few days after the 104th anniversary of Georgetownian incorporation.

"and it was" by pdgibson from the Seattlest Flickr Pool. Reminds us of Tom's fantastic post about this Ballard landmark's demise. Lucky for some, it appears that things may be looking up for this mid-20th century modern building.

The historic Moore Theatre turns 100 this year. December 28th is their big centennial celebration. We got to thinking about this major milestone the last time we were there. It was last Monday night, the Iron and Wine show. We were sitting in our seats, waiting for razor-shy Sam Beam to take the stage and we got to looking around. As always we were impressed by the high ceiling, grand arches, intricate moldings... Then we...

After coming across yet another "we're trying to save the sign" campaign in the paper in regards to the big Leilani Lanes pin (the last we remember being the Wonderbread sign) Seattlest is struck that trying to make all of Seattle a big outdoor MOHAI doesn't really do much for actual preservation. The bowling alley is gone and we'll have to make do with Sunset (or the Garage, or any of the others that Contributor Emeritus Steve Mandich wrote up in his awesome bowling series for Seattlest). Sticking a big bowling pin on the side of new construction seems kind of like conquerors popping heads on pikes as a warning to others. Looking at you, Showbox.

Seattlest has been making some semblance of a living writing about music for a few years now. During that time, we've tried to put into words performances by some truly great artists (Chris Thile comes to mind), and it never gets easier to verbalize music. Talking about music really like dancing about architecture, although we have felt the inexplicable desire to dance inside extraordinary buildings before.

Mac released its new Leopard operating system on Friday, and low-tech Seattlest wonders what's up. So we asked Aron Beal, a Web applications developer and genuine Mac nerd, to tell us.

In December 1992, Kurt Cobain and rock journalist Michael Azerrad began a series of interviews that would eventually become the beating heart of Azerrad's band biography, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. For that project, Azerrad recorded over 25 hours of the rock star's musings and reflections, but until pairing with director AJ Schnack to make Kurt Cobain About a Son, had never released the tapes' contents to the public. This film, then, playing at the Varsity for just one week, is a gift to Nirvana fans, the Kurt-curious and grunge scholars everywhere.

Seattle. Portland. Which one's better? You may say: "How can you choose? Each has their good points. It's like asking which religion is better." Guess what, asshole, that Negative Nellie attitude is the reason nobody ever asks for your fucking opinion. Jerk. Yesterday, Jeremy Barker advocated the pro-Seattle position. Now, it's Portland's turn.

This weekend Seattlest was standing outside of Jules Maes in Georgetown trying to explain to someone which part, exactly, of the Rainier Cold Storage compound across the street was about to be torn down. It's the Stock House which is north of here a bit--it's, uh...no. Ok, it's down there near the...no. Not thirty feet from us and directly across the street there's a sign that says "Stock House." Yep, that's it.

Man, if the EU court that stuck it to Microsoft this weekend and Mr. and Mrs. Slowsky were in a race it would probably go off the board for betters. It's. Taking. For. Ever. The crime is Microsoft shutting out competitors by bundling Windows Media Player with Windows, which, to us at least, seems like an ancient issue. What are they going to go after Microsoft for next? Attaching round wheels to an axle? We were all about this issue when it was browsers that were being shut out of Microsoft operating systems, but for some reason we can't get all that excited about media players. Real Player? QuickTime? Fuck 'em. More troubling to us are the protocols that Microsoft has refused to open. Standards; there is a point to it, after all.

The Rainier Cold Storage Stock House--part of the beautiful and historic and absolutely irreplaceable Rainier Cold Storage campus in Georgetown--is being replaced. The building cannot be saved as Seattlest has previously discussed here and here, and a campaign to try to force property owners Sabey Corp. to preserve it as-is seems like it wouldn't hold up in the face of the condition of the building, despite the Seattle Historic Landmark status it currently enjoys. Brooke Best, Friend of Georgetown History, told Seattlest in an email, "Sabey made great efforts (beyond what most developers would have done) to come up with alternative proposals to demolition." But demolition it is.

Last week Seattlest whined about the pending doom of the Rainier Cold Storage Stock House in Georgetown, a building that is a Seattle Historic Landmark. "'Historic Landmark' might as well be a death sentence in Seattle," we said, meaning that any building so labeled in Seattle would be quickly demolished (although later in the week the Seattle Weekly would have a different take on the phrase in an article about Peter Steinbrueck and his recent Landmark-a-thon Downtown).

If we were a building older than sixty years or so in Seattle right now we'd really think about going on the lam, laying low for the next few years, maybe sending the wife and kids off to her sister's lake cabin, although they'll probably come for that, too, eventually. It's just not safe for an old landmark building in the current environment. Next up on the block is the Rainier Cold Storage Stock House in Georgetown--It's owners are planning to demolish it. The Stock House is a part of the 5.5 acre Rainier campus that was declared a Seattle Historic Landmark in 1993. "Historic Landmark" might as well be a death sentence in Seattle.

Seattlest took a little jaunt up to downtown Pacific Rim Canada the other weekend. Vancouver is the Toronto of western Canada and, just like its gritty eastern counterpart, we just *big throbbing heart* the place. We love its density, its layout, and its landscape. We love the architecture, even its endless kilometers of glass and steel high rises. Moreover, it's a walkable city. If you're a reasonably able-bodied tourist, you should be able to stomp all over Vancouver's geo-stylistically pornographic downtown peninsula without problem.

Well-known alterna-librarian Jessamyn West came to town recently, and finally had a chance to check out our flagship library. Her verdict?

I saw a real disconnect beween the lovely outside and grand entry spaces to the library, plus a few other very design-y areas, and the rest of the building. Materials were hard to find. VERY hard to find. Signage was abysmal, often just laserprinted pieces of paper, sometimes laminated and sometimes not. Doors to areas that may have been public were forbidding and unwelcoming. There weren’t enough elevators. There weren’t enough bathrooms. There wasn’t a comfortable place to sit in the entire building. There were lots of “dead spaces” that, because of architecture, couldn’t really be used for anything and they were collecting dust. The lighting was bad. Stack areas were dim and narrow. The teen area seemed like an afterthought. Bizarre display areas with a table and some books on it were in the middle of vast open areas. Most of the place felt like it was too big and then the stacks felt too crowded and I had to climb around people working to find things. Shelvers shut down the entire “spiral” concept with booktrucks. The writer’s area in this library is a shadow of the glorious writers room in the old downtown building where I had a desk briefly.

Ouch. Of course, these criticisms aren't new. Maybe we agree as a city that our Koolhaas building is way cooler than our Gehry building, but maybe we're all starting to agree that the bar shouldn't be set quite that low.

Some signs went up at the future site of the Colman Center earlier this week. Where there is currently a parking lot surrounded by Western Ave, the alleyway entrance to the Owl and Thistle, the pedestrian walkway to the ferry terminal and an on ramp to the Viaduct there will soon (2009) stand a 12-story office tower that's making the case that there is a market for "green" office space in Seattle. What's particularly environmentally friendly about an office building, apart from the whole consolidation of resources thing? According to the building's website: LEED certification, a green roof, reclaimed water irrigation, low-flow showers and toilets and a community bicycle fleet, among a few other more boring features. While some of those sound cool (particularly the bikes, although we imagine they will never get used) if you really want to do green building right--and in Seattle we really should--you should go all the way. How about using reclaimed water for those low-flow showers as well as irrigating the green roof? How about a carbon-neutral building? How about solar power?

The cold wind of actual necessity is blowing up Seattle's skirt. Much like our childhood erector-set constructions, the Viaduct has a certain amount of "give" in it (though hopefully not due to the same reason: our dislike of tightening every single nut on things we were just going to take apart anyway), but the news last week that it has sunk 5 inches at its saggiest point has bells going off because 6 inches is the magic number when it's an emergency. Aaooogah!

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on.