Seattle Has At all times Been a Metropolis of Ugly Buildings – Slog

This isn’t even an interesting building for Portland, Oregon. But compared to what we find in Seattle, it looks like a work of a different order of architectural brilliance. Charles Mudede

Before the first plague of the 21st century, I walked about 80,000 steps a week. In the depths of the plague, that number fell to 20,000 steps. And what I gradually lost I gained in pounds. However, during the so-called thaw – a combination of the transition to spring and a declining number of COVID-19 cases – my pace was expanded to 55,000 per week. (However, my pounds refuse to register this dramatic increase in activity.)

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What more steps meant is that from the sidewalks, most of which are poorly managed by the city, I see more of the larger city again. It also meant that I remembered many of the unfortunate aspects of the city, such as the type of architecture that shaped much of its long building boom.

While Seattle has some top notch architectural firms like Olson Kundig and LMN, the mid-range price isn’t great for what we find in Portland, Oregon. (Many blame the distinction in their design processes for the stark differences – Portland is warm for architectural variance; Seattle is completely cold to them.) As a result, anyone who has walked the streets of the third largest city in the Pacific Northwest can always expect a pleasant surprise . Turn a corner and all of a sudden a medium-sized project appears that uses wood, for example, in a flashy way.

What we can say for sure is that the Seattle process has been a displaced urbanism for the past 20 years. This is the name of our game in the way Vancouverism (thin human-based towers at street level) is the name of the game in the second largest city in the Pacific Northwest.

The question I want to ask in this post is, does the Seattle process make Seattle ugly? Does design-and-deaden destroy what was once beautiful? I believe believing this means that your analytical powers are being distracted or blunted by the aura of nostalgia.

Seattle has never been a remarkable city architecturally. What is viewed as a landscape of monotonous, five-story apartment buildings has always been a landscape of monotonous single-family homes written either by the Seattle Box or, to use the words of Joshua Prince-Ramus, who participated with Rem Koolhaus in the design of the Seattle Central Library in “the language of the bungalows or whatever they are called”.

Those who are misled by nostalgia need to be forgiven at some level. An old bungalow or box has at least the charm of being old. That is something. In traditional Japanese aesthetics, this type of appreciation is known as sabi, which is the recognition of the long effect of time on a material. (“Sabi” can be translated as “rust”.)

We see the movement of the sun, the snowfall, the hitting of the rain over a temporal distance that extends over the years in decades and the decades in centuries. And so one does not admire the architecture, but its slow dispersion, its grainy weathering, its gradual sinking into the noble state of a ruin.

We must remember that this sense of admiration for the work of the times is not specific to Japanese culture. The ancient Romans, it is said, hated Christianity because it was in a state of innovation in Caesar’s time, but Judaism received the respect of the state. This religion was ancient and tested by the elements of the past. In our time we are impressed with improvements (of the future); With the Romans, the place of admiration was resilience (the ancient ones, the long weathered ones).

Only when Seattle looks good … Charles Mudede

But the great outdoors around Seattle makes up for the lack of architectural beauty. A camera that takes a wide-angle shot of the 206 will never disappoint. Whatever bad architectures small, medium, or large in the picture, they are drawn into the beauty of its translucent light, its dark blue, its deep green, its low-rolling clouds, its distant mountains.

The other interesting thing is that in Portland, Oregon, it’s the exact opposite. The city has no justice to offer a distant view. But at the level of the street it reveals its many wonders. You walk around Seattle to take a look at the whole. one goes to Portland to find something new and unexpected.