You’ve heard about it already, but it’s so depressingly hilarious and sick at the same time I can’t stop myself from joining the echo chamber: In the biggest convention of one of the two most powerful political parties on planet earth, like a pack of drunken frat boys at a football game the crowd “spontaneously” […]
One hundred and three ~6-foot wide concrete steps dropping ~60 feet across a ~130 foot span. That’s the public benefit the citizens of Seattle will receive for allowing the development of a luxury condo/hotel in one of the most prime urban locations in the entire Pacific Northwest. As we’ve already discussed on this blog, the […]
This alley off the southern edge of Harbor Steps between University and Seneca Streets is one of the nicest examples of pedestrian-oriented public realm into downtown Seattle. Except that like the rest of the Harbor Steps open space, it’s not actually public. The alley and the University St. right-of-way between 1st and Western were “vacated” […]
Perhaps rather more polite and soft spoken than your typical bomb, but totally the bomb nonetheless. As in this recent Daily Score post about the irrelevance of GDP, with the opening line, “This just cheeses me off.” Or this little gem of a title: Less Driving Means Less Dying. But the post I want to […]
This is the Terry Thomas, Weber Thompson’s new 40,000 sf office building in South Lake Union. It has no air-conditioning. That is, it’s the first significant office building without air-conditioning to be constructed in Seattle for perhaps half a century. NBBJ wanted to do this at Alley 24 but the developer got conservative and decided […]
Seattle’s average household size is 2.08, the smallest of any major U.S. city. Richard Morrill has an informative piece up over at Crosscut discussing this and other demographic trends based on the latest American Community Survey. In short, Seattle is apparrently overflowing with the young, single, wealthy, and overeducated (one downside of which, according to […]
This was the scene on Labor Day afternoon at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park on the west edge of the Mount Baker neighborhood. You can see why one commenter nominated this park for the least used park in Seattle. Given the park’s relative isolation, the low surrounding population density, the lack of activation on […]
…for beating this deceased-and-decaying-horse cycling issue a little longer with the following three riffs: 1.) Field Report: Today on my two-mile ride to work downtown, I encountered three cars not using turn signals. Then on my way home, I saw three bikes run a red light at 4th and Pike. Which behavior is more cause […]
[ False Creek North, Vancouver, BC ] A new citizens group has formed to oppose proposed upzones for the South Lake Union neighborhood. The group’s desire to see South Lake Union grow into a diverse and complete neighborhood is spot on. But alas, going on what the PI reported, it appears that their main beef […]
My urbanist geek friend Don Vehige got all excited about some pedestrian behavior he observed downtown at 1st and University and snapped the photos below. Apparently people lose their ability to read during sunny Saturday afternoons, because the construction area at the front of the new Four Seasons hotel has the biggest and most explicit […]
Leave it up to a starchitect like Rem Koolhaas to create engaging, lively, useful public spaces like the pivotol corner of 4th Avenue and Spring Street. Someone tell me how this promotes an active street face? I don’t know whether to blame the City of Seattle for being so ga-ga over the Dutchman and allowing this […]
The scoldiest urban scold that ever scolded, Lewis Mumford, had a bone to pick with Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan back in 1970: But it remained for McLuhan to picture as technology’s ultimate gift a more absolute mode of control: one that will achieve total illiteracy, with no permanent record except that officially […]
is Two Union Square — at least that’s the word on the street. Designed by NBBJ, completed in 1989; 56 floors, 740 feet tall (third tallest in Seattle), with ~1,100,000 square feet of rentable space. But there’s a pretty low bar for modern skyscrapers in Seattle, and to me, ranking them is sort of like […]
If you’re looking for indicators of the chances we can turn our self-destructing culture around before the entire planet is devoured, witness the howls of “nanny state” in response to Seattle’s 20-cent bag tax. Might I suggest that this reaction is not the most promising indicator? In the context of the ecological limits of the […]
Cost, you say? Accessibility? Lack of imagination? Oh Europe and your ancient progressive ways…
It only took the PI four days to catch up with the news, first reported on the Seattle Condo Blog, that Moda (shown above) is converting from condos to apartments. How far can the pendulum swing in this direction? From the PI: “The market and the financing conditions for condominiums have really taken a drastic […]
[ Source: Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and EPA ] Via Sightline, the 2005 U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions chart above illustrates an alternative way cut the pie, emphasizing the importance of goods and materials, and suggesting we ought to look at ways to use less stuff. But to intelligently assign priorities, it’s also helpful […]
