What's So Great About Seattle?

What's So Great About Seattle? Sightline answers....

...the Central Library, smack in the heart of downtown. It's fascinating architecture; in fact, The New Yorker called it "the most important new library to be built in a generation." From the street level, it's an imposing building — so much so that it probably violates Seattle-based blogger David Sucher's tthree rules for pedestrian-friendly urban design. But despite my initial misgivings about the building's scale...

While the Central Library certainly does violate the Three Rules and in fact does not contribute to the walkability of downtown Seattle (except as eye candy) the tragedy is that it could have been both: brilliant eye candy and also adhering to the Three Rules so that it contributes to a lively sidewalk. I am sorry that the two are posed as if they are inherently in opposition.

There is no inherent conflict between starchitecture like Koolhaas' Central Library and walkable urbanism. In practice of course very little startchitecture is designed to enhance the walkability of its neighborhood. But it doesn't have to be so. 

We can have both starchitecture (to the degree we really want i) and walkable urbanism. The tragedy is that there is an assumption that we can't and so we let starchitects run wild and ignore the need/desire for buildings which support walkable urbanism.

•••

As a side issue, I am a bit by about the use of the word "scale," above. In fact the Central Library is not very big — certainly vastly lower than the office towers which surround it in the Seattle CBD. I can't quite follow the argument that the Library is too big — if anything it is too small and doesn't use the building envelope which zoning makes available to the site.