Lighting the Park

As we've previously written, the new Counterbalance Park in Lower Queen Anne (aka Uptown) has been flickering with new LED lights that were part of the original design. (The park is located at the base of Queen Anne Ave. North, where it meets Roy Street.) But, for a variety of reasons, they've been delayed since the park's ceremonial opening in July. So now there's to be a second opening on Saturday, featuring a band from McClure Middle School, hot cider, and s'mores. (Mmmm, s'mores.) Details as follows:

Counterbalance Park, 2 Roy St., www.seattle.gov/parks. Free. 5-7 p.m. Sat. Dec. 6.

The $1.1 million makeover of the old gas station site, long vacant, was made possible by $300,000 from the 2000 Seattle Pro-Parks Levy, with the balance raised by the Uptown Alliance from various local benefactors. We applaud the effort. But we also wonder why the park is being rolled out twice, and why it's seemingly being built in stages, and why some portions of the design still haven't been implemented. And, moreover, who gets credit for the LED design versus the landscape architecture: Murase Associates, a Portland firm with a Seattle branch office; or Italian-born Seattle artist Iole Alessandrini? At least one SW reader has suggested she was fired from the project.

So we decided to ask her, and the city, and Murase what's going on with the "urban oasis" (that being the official city suffix to the name—how many other parks get such an honorific?)...

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Topics: Architecture, Art Events, Seattle Streets, and Visual Arts

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New Packaging for the EMP?

File this one under the Department of Things We Actually Like: Esther da Costa Meyer's new book Frank Gehry: On Line (Princeton University Press, $29.95), which comes inside an ingenious corrugated cardboard slip cover. Within, the small paperback looks like it's made of brushed, stainless steel. Like hard inside of soft, the structure inside the skin, only everything is 100 percent recyclable. (Though design geeks will keep it forever, of course.)

Gehry's architecture and sketches are presently being featured at Princeton, and this is essentially the catalog for the exhibit. Closer to home, Paul Allen's scalloped, multicolored, titanium-skinned, monorail-pierced Experience Music Project is the only local sample of the L.A. architect's work. It's famously a building with Too Much Going On (unlike his more successful museum in Bilbao, Spain). But then Gehry is a flamboyant designer who got initial notice for wrapping houses in chain-link fencing and such.

Somehow, too, this book-and-box combo recalls old ad campaigns from print and TV. You know the sort—a pickup truck or Rolls driving across a cardboard span. Or an elephant standing on a cardboard box to show how strong it is.

Of course, Gehry is such a famous boutique architect, working at such a high commission rate (which is why he and Allen parted company on EMP's awful, touristy interior), that Seattle will probably never again host one of his designs. Unless it's made out of something cheap, like cardboard. In which regard our city's homeless population is way ahead of him.

Topics: Architecture and Books & Authors

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Lost in the Library? It's Your Own Stupid Fault.

Oh, and speaking of the library ... While being interviewed by the P-I, architect Joshua Prince-Ramus, an assistant to Rem Koolhaas, said this:

When you understand the building, it is very simple — just a series of boxes. But what we didn't understand is, to the uninitiated person, someone not an architect or library staffer, it can be complex if they don't understand that. What we thought is blatantly obvious, isn't.

Topics: Architecture

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You Can't Be Too Thin...

...but how rich will you have to be to live here? This 400-foot-tall hypothetical condominium tower has been proposed for a tiny site jammed up close to I-5, and next door to a housing facility for chronic alcoholics at Yale and Howell. Over at his invaluable Web site, hugeasscity.com, Dan Bertolet has a good analysis of the project, which is as much provocation as design by local architecture firm Pb Elemental. We like the way it shakes up the staid conventions against tall, dense downtown housing and uses some aggressive engineering to max out a parcel not much larger than a tennis court. Given how much of each floor (some 2,000 square feet) would have to be dedicated to the elevator core and structural elements, we doubt the thing ever gets built at a price anyone could afford. Still, the Denny Triangle and South Lake Union are filling up fast with well-heeled tech companies including (soon) Amazon.com. But we're guessing the wealthy owners of these 19 hypothetical homes probably won't be inviting their boozy neighbors over for any cocktail parties.

Topics: Architecture

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