The Smith Tower

The Smith Tower boasts the title of Oldest Skyscraper in Seattle. When it first opened, in 1914, it was also one of the tallest buildings in the country outside of New York. It was built with steel from Pennsylvania and white terracotta from California, with bronze window frames, and Alaskan marble and Mexican onyx in its high-speed elevators. If you want to impress your customers, the reasoning went, build an office building they won't forget.

This reasoning was par for the course in New York at the turn of the century. The Singer Sewing Machine skyscraper, finished in 1908, was 612 feet tall. The Metropolitan Life Insurance skyscraper, completed in 1909, reached 675 feet. The F.W. Woolworth skyscraper, which took until 1913, took first prize at 792 feet. Practically speaking, it wasn't necessary. But as an expression of sheer virility and commercial clout such height was priceless.

The story of the Smith Tower, which stands 462 feet high, is rather more endearing. Lyman Cornelius Smith, of Smith & Wesson firearms and Smith Corona typewriters, visited Seattle in 1909, returning to New York with sensible plans for a 14-story structure. On his return, however, he discovered that his son Burns Lyman Smith had been studying skyscrapers, and was determined they should stop at no less than a 21-story building topped with a 20-story tower.

The combined enthusiasm of wife and son was quite sufficient to convince Smith senior. Their architects, Gaggin & Gaggin, were in due course presented with plans for a 42-story skyscraper topped with a gothic pyramid modeled on the Metropolitan Life Insurance building in New York, itself modeled on the Campanile San Marco in Venice. The fact that neither Smiths nor Gaggins had ever built anything taller than five stories was no deterrence; on the contrary, Burns modestly vowed that it would be finished "as finely as money and brains know how."

When the Smith Tower eventually opened, two years behind schedule, it did not quite reach the soaring 522-foot height and 42 stories that Burns had promised. At 462 feet, it had 36 floors, 33 of which were rentable office space, plus a caretaker's apartment, oriental function room with observation deck, and pyramid. It was proudly compared to the 476-foot Great Pyramid of Giza, and its neoclassical styling and gleaming white terracotta made it a striking building - albeit slightly oddly proportioned, resembling a "long-necked giraffe" for Seattle design critic John Pastier. More enthusiastic than refined, perhaps; but undoubtedly charismatic.

Houseboats

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.

This vision of water-haunted New Yorkers, standing in their thousands "like silent sentinels" around Manhattan, is from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It picks up on a desire that seems apposite to Seattle: here, people don't just stand at the edge of the land, they build houses to float at the edge of the water.

And not just a few. Houseboats began to appear here in 1905, and by the Depression of the 1930s there were over 2000 on Lake Union and Portage Bay. These were floating shacks with wood stoves where you could live for next to nothing, homes for the down and out. As the decades passed they became fully fledged bohemian communities, then as moorage fees rose and city laws tightened they became more exclusive enclaves. Today, there are about 500 houseboats in Seattle, mostly owned by professionals.

It's not hard to see why houseboats have become desirable. Their beautiful views, urban location and characterful community would be enough. But nothing compares to the sheer delight of living at the "extremest limit of the land." Here, houseboats stretch out into the lake five or six deep, with narrow canals between them, or cluster around miniature harbors. Amerigo Vespucci was so taken by the profusion of houses on stilts on the shore of Lake Maracaibo in South America that he named the region Venezuela, or "little Venice." It's an apt description of this part of Seattle, too.

Ithaka

I was flabbergasted when I first found out that I was living near a rain forest.

The Olympic Peninsula, whose mountaintops can be seen from Seattle, is home to the Hoh, Queets and Quinault temperate rain forests. Larger than the state of Massachusetts, the peninsula is almost entirely a National Park and protected wilderness area. The combination of high rainfall and a mild climate produces trees wreathed in mosses and epiphytes. They are mainly conifers, photosynthesizing enthusiastically all year round, with a thriving green understory, and ferns and shrubs below that.

They are also old-growth forests. Not only have they grown untouched for hundreds of years, but trees of all ages exist side by side. Mature trees form a multi-layered canopy; when one dies, light reaches down to encourage younger understory trees; and the dead logs that fall provide nursing ground for seedlings.

Actor Alexandra Hedison, of L-Word fame, is also (you may be surprised to hear) a fine art photographer. She recently staged an exhibition of large-format photographs of these Olympic trees, which she showed in Los Angeles, New York and London. "What seemed so overwhelming to me was the continuous life of the forest, the constant, rain-watered regeneration," she told The New Yorker. "My life was the only finite presence."

She entitled the exhibit Ithaka, after the poem by C.P. Cavafy. Intrigued, I looked it up. It's a meditation on the importance of journey, not just destination, inspired by Odysseus's adventure-filled return from Troy. It's a famous poem, and it gives good advice, but is not particularly profound (Miley Cyrus's latest single makes the same point, minus the Greek mythology). Hedison is making a much more interesting statement than that. Her photographs of trees are imagined as portraits. She encourages you to read them as personalities, subject to the passage of time, interdependent and alive.

Old-growth forest is perpetually under threat from the logging industry, and her exhibition has come at an opportune moment, as environmental concerns move from the margin to the mainstream. She is not anthropomorphizing these trees - far from it. But she is presenting them as worthy of the comparison with us, and deserving of our attention. And that's surely a good start.

Et in Arcadia Ego

Located on an outcrop of land at the north end of Lake Union, Gasworks Park is famous for stunning views across the lake to downtown, pleasant grassy slopes, and an excellent kite-flying hill. Oh yes, and on one side, an ancient rusting retired gasworks.

The controversy over whether this area should become industrial heartland for the city or a green park and viewpoint began in 1903. But the Seattle Gas Light Company had already begun buying plots of land, and would not be dissuaded. The gasworks produced gas first from coal, and then, from 1937 onwards, from oil. The plant was in operation from 1906 until 1956, when Seattle converted to natural gas.

In 1962 the City of Seattle began purchasing the abandoned gasworks, rejecting development proposals in favor of creating a park. Richard Haag, who was hired as designer, was eager to preserve the ruins of the gasworks for their "historic, esthetic and utilitarian value."

I'm not convinced that this strange, fenced-off sculptural presence is utilitarian exactly, but in terms of historic preservation I think Haag made the right call. Of 1,400 gasworks that were once in operation in the United States, this is the only one still intact. Grimly rusty, it's both a monument to industrial progress and a cautionary tale of environmental ignorance: before the park could be opened to the public, extensive bioremediation was required to deal with the contaminated soil, groundwater and lake sediment.

And when it comes to aesthetics, I find myself again agreeing, because I'm intrigued by Haag's challenge to the conventional beauty of urban park spaces. When it was opened in 1973, Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times that "The complex array of towers, tanks and pipes of the gasworks forms a powerful industrial still life." If it is an industrial still life, it's one descended rather from the muckraker honesty of Thomas Anshutz or the Ash Can School than the soaring homages to progress of Modernist artists.

In Edmund Spencer's The Shepheardes Calendar, published in 1579, the pastoral idyll is powerful rather than cloying precisely because it is always being threatened. And a common trope of pastoral art is the memento mori, as in Nicolas Poussin's painting Et in Arcadia Ego.
Perhaps the unlikely aesthetic appeal of the rusting industrial hulk at Gasworks taps into this unease, the power of the skull in the pastoralist's Arcadian landscape.

Smashed Stratocasters

Paul Allen's multimillion-dollar homage to Jimi Hendrix, the Experience Music Project, is perched right next to the space needle. It was designed by Frank O. Gehry, architect of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and opened as a popular music museum in 2000. High-tech interactive exhibits inside tell the story of rock 'n' roll, from its roots to its legends to its influences on later genres. There's also an exhibit on the emergence of grunge in Seattle in the '90s. The problem is that although the building is beloved by tourists, everyone else finds it hideous.

"Frank Gehry has created some wonderful buildings," wrote Jonathan Raban in The Independent, "but his Seattle effort, the Experience Music Project, is not one of them."

New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described the EMP as resembling "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died." Further comparisons have been made to an airplane wreck, open-heart surgery gone wrong, a dumped-over garbage can and "something found under the couch at a college fraternity house."

The comparison to a smashed Stratocaster, made by The Seattle Weekly, comes the closest to Gehry's intentions. He had in fact bought and smashed several in the name of inspiration while designing the building.

Unfortunately, the edgy rock 'n' roll stance Gehry attempted to emulate by inflicting violence on electric guitars has been somewhat undermined by the EMP's widely accepted status as blobitecture. This architectural movement favors bulging, organic, amoeba-like shapes. Another example of blobitecture is The Eden Project--which, unlike the EMP, does not suffer from the comparison to amoebae.

Judging, however, from the imaginative range of invectives launched at the EMP, I shall conclude with a positive surmise: that despised as it is, Seattleites actually quite enjoy the pastime of insulting it.

Urban Decay Chic, West Coast Style

I was struck by a photo in a friend's blog recently, depicting what he rather nicely terms urban decay chic. It's instantly recognizable, and prompted from me an affectionate sigh: Ah, Europe! Here, in response, is an example of artistic urban decay on the West Coast.

The quotation comes from poet and political activist John Trudell. He was chairman of the American Indian Movement for most of the 70s, and in the 80s began recording his poetry to Native music. These lyrics come from his 2002 album Bone Days, produced by none other than Angelina Jolie. The full excerpt runs as follows:

Crazy Horse
We hear what you say.
One earth, one mother.
One does not sell the earth
The people walk upon.
We are the land.
How do we sell our mother?
How do we sell the stars?
How do we sell the earth?

Crazy Horse was a respected Oglala Lakota war leader who fought against the U.S. in the Battle of Little Bighorn, 1876. His actions served as inspiration for Trudell, although these are not words Crazy Horse would have spoken - after all, he spoke Lakota. But Trudell was not alone in ventriloquising this viewpoint. Consider Ted Perry's famous reimagining of Chief Seattle's speech from 1854:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

Ironically, although Perry wrote this for a film in 1972, it has been widely accepted as the 'original.' Since Seattle spoke in Lushootseed, and had his words translated first into Chinook and then into Victorian English from the notes of a Dr. Henry Smith who was present, the notion of 'original' is compromised to begin with. There are some pretty thorny problems of appropriation, mistranslation, and romanticization here, but what fascinates me is how this stance, however much of a construct it is, has entered the collective imagination. To the point where it's been graffitied on a street-side wall on Roosevelt Way.

I defy you to find graffiti in Europe that makes a guilt-ridden plea for environmental rights through the words - however apocryphal - of the displaced indigenous peoples. This is urban decay chic, west coast style.

On Staircases

It's not quite Montmartre, but this staircase on the south side of Queen Anne hill does a pretty good impression of those leaf-shadowed flights of steps in Paris. Moreover, this is not the only such stair on the hill: according to local architect-turned-cartographer Thomas Horton there are no less than 120 in this one neighborhood.

They are often a find, these steps: hidden from view until you stumble across them, they are shortcuts with breathtaking views of Puget Sound and the downtown skyscrapers. In the early 1900s there were cable cars to transport the young city's elite up to their mansions on the hill. Now you have no choice (if you have no car) but to get out of breath.

Queen Anne is not the only Seattle neighborhood on a hill. The fact that there are 550 public staircases should indicate that this is a very hilly place to live. It should also indicate that there are a lot more intriguing corners than the grid-system street layout would suggest.

Recently, descending a little-used staircase on the west side of Capitol Hill, I discovered a semi-wild public garden I had had no idea existed. Following what appeared to be a rabbit trail through the trees, I came across this:

Sometimes the unmapped, off-staircase, rabbit-trail discoveries are the best.

Googie Icon: The Space Needle

Welcome to 1962. The Space Race is on, futurism is in, and Seattle is preparing to host the World's Fair. The design of the tower that's going to wow 2.3 million visitors has finally been decided. It will be a compromise between Edward Carlson's sketch - on the back of a napkin - of a giant balloon tethered to the ground, and John Graham's architectural drawing of a flying saucer.

I kid you not.

Today, of course, it's the most iconic structure in Seattle. The Space Needle is 605 feet high, weighs 9,550 tons, and is built to withstand 200 mph winds and earthquakes registering 9.5 on the Richter scale. Part of the trick to this is that there's an awful lot of concrete and steel out of sight underneath it: the Needle's center of gravity is only five feet above the ground.

While it did not retain its proud title of Tallest Structure West of the Mississippi for long, as a sixties style icon it's as great as ever. It falls under the banner of Googie architecture, which peaked in the fifties in southern California - think motels and gas stations with space-age-y geometric or curvaceous designs. You can call it doo-wop, if you prefer. Either way, what was futuristic at the time is now... retro-futuristic.

Just don't ask me to explain the chronology of that.