Saving Face in Seattle
What do you do when a beloved building is where you want to build a new 22-story high rise tower? Most developers and elected officials would assume you have to clear the existing site.
Saving a facade is not a new concept but when done well it still interests me. I think it is good to continually remind ourselves this is an option to completely razing an existing structure.
From the new architect’s website:
Built in 1915, the Crystal Pool Natatorium was once among the most popular gathering spots in the city. Protected by a glass roof, the huge pool was filled with saltwater siphoned from Elliott Bay by a monstrous coal-fired pump and then heated to a tempting temperature.
Given the pool’s pedigree – it was designed by theater architect Martin Priteca, creator of Seattle’s Coliseum, Paramount and Orpheum theaters – it’s no surprise the Crystal Pool showcases one of the most artistic façades in town.
The new tower retains old walls facing each street but the corner element is new — a retail space. The windows in the old facade are also updated with metal canopies to help protect pedestrians from rain as they walk along the sidewalk. While not a pure restoration of the entire original envelope it is an acceptable compromise.
Architect Blaine Weber from the Puget Sound Business Journal:
Weber said Cristalla’s developers deserve kudos for going “beyond the call of duty.” Despite its age and artistry, the Crystal Pool is not an official landmark. While the city’s design review board and the Belltown community expressed a strong desire to save at least the façade, the developers did not have to listen.
“Another developer with an aggressive attorney could have said we can’t spend another $ 2 million or $ 3 million preserving this,” said Weber.
Besides incorporating the façade, developers also “left quite a few square feet on the table” when they embraced a slimmer and less obtrusive design, reducing floor plates from an average of 20,000 square feet to 15,000 square feet, said Weber.
The retention of the old facade as well as the use of massing to relate to the low-rise buildings adjacent to the site shows great skill. From the sidewalk you really don’t get the sense you are walking next to a 22-story tower — and that is a sign of a pedestrian friendly high rise.
– Steve
It’s too bad Desco could not have at least done something similar in building the Century Garage.
Street-level presence is what makes vertical density work, as case in point with this Seattle example. In some cases, it is done more so with facade design than mixed uses, but either technique can help produce a more comfortable streetscape for walking.
Older buildings like the lost Century, to-be-revitalized Arcade, and continually adapting Chemical, all have a different architecture at street level than their more uniform bulks above. In constrast, many of our newer downtown office buildings are cold, uninviting places at street-level.
The newer Laclede Gas building (8th/Olive) has little distinction from its street-level facade from its continued Modernist box above. But the older Laclede Gas building (11th/Olive) actually has visual distinction in the fenestration and facade materials distinguishing lower floors from upper floors.
And even though the newer Laclede Gas building has street-level retail, the lack of separate entrances and other visual distinctions make such spaces seem private. For if your patrons have to walk through a lobby with a security desk, you aren’t likely to draw any window-shopping foot traffic. At least, Laclede Gas let access to the 8th/Pine station be cut into an otherwise lifeless corner of its black box.
In comparison to the newer Laclede Gas building, the likewise Modernist Millenium (6th/Olive) also lacks varying facade treatment between its street-level floors and upper floors. Yet in contrast, the Millenium at least has direct access to its retail spaces (Starbuck’s, florists) from the street, inviting others besides building tenants to patronize such street-fronting spaces.
Sorry, Steve. That’s really ugly.
^He’s right.
And the Ninth Street Shoppes/Garage is beautiful?
Steve’s photo is just one example – I don’t think this particular building is all that great, but I do think that facades of older buildings can be attractively incorporated into new structures.
I agree, Brian.
Have you seen Rollin Stanley’s slides of Toronto’s modern high(-er)-rises disguised atop older historic buildings?
Too bad the stuff behind has nothing to do with the salvaged facade. Proportions are all screwy and everything. Whats up with the glass egg in front?
Im sure glad they put that EIFS cornice up there on the 4th floor- that makes it look SO much better!
Maybe they could have torn down the whole thing and spent the money for some real design instead of trying to save some leftovers. I applaud what they were trying to do, but to use a worn phrase “they lost the forest through the trees”
J
I think this a valid idea, but the execution of the idea has a long way to go.
It maintains a good connection between pedestrians on the sidewalk and the building; modern buildings just don’t do this well very often. But I’m with PE on this, looked at from a distance this example and others I’ve seen are very awkward.
Especially here, where the main attraction of the original building was the corner facade, which was completely lost, and the re-creation is worse than if they had just forgotten about it.
If Downtown St. Louis ever reaches the level of Chicago is at currently with its Downtown development frenzy I will worry about the Mississippi Valley Trust Building which I think is at Fourth Street Pine. It is two or so stories and commands an impressive lot of real estate.
I’m afraid I agree with Callow on this one. I don’t like this at all. Preserving a building doesn’t mean sticking its facade onto a glass box. If a reasonable reuse that shows at least some respect to its original design can’t be found, then just tear the entire thing down and build something new and innovative. Maybe this sort of facadomy can be done in a more elegant way, but I’ve never seen a good example of one.
It sounds to me like those developers tooted their own horns a lot over the fact that they saved a tiny snippet of that building, when they should have been talking about how they could save more of it (if not the whole thing).
I do not think that half-demolishing our beautiful historic buildings and then building new postmodern, scale-less “architecture” on top of them is an acceptable compromise. That highrise insults the building it rises from. I’m glad part of the building is saved, but come on, we can do better than that. This facadectomy looks like the recently revised Soldier Field in Chicago (image: http://academics.triton.edu/faculty/fheitzman/soldier%20field%203.jpg), and Soldier Field looks like it threw up.
yall have hit it on the head. This is an option when say, the original building is structurally unsound, but had some character that was worth trying to save, or it had burned down and someone wanted to pay homage to the original or something, but this is almost a sterilized deconstruction of a once perfectly viable building. I could see them with the one in St. Louis (the Schupp office) where they rip down everything but the facade then put a glass tower about 3 feet back. Its almost already bad enough that the building has a 2 story metal roof on it.
I did see this done once or twice in the war ravaged buildings in Berlin. the Reichstag has a new glass dome courtesy of Sir Norman Foster. Not exactly my favorite example. But try the Mill that was done recently http://www.millcitymuseum.org This one is really cool.
J
[REPLY – This is a general reply to this and all the previous comments on this topic. I guess you’ll have to see the building in person or I’ll have to get around to posting a closer image. From the sidewalk it does not seem cheesy at all. You feel like you are walking past the old building. I don’t know the state of condition when they started — for all we know it could have been about to fall in. Remember this is earthquake territory and masonry buildings don’t do so well.
They had three choices – leave the old building in place and find another site. Tear down every bit of the old building and just build a new tower or what they did. Given the articulation of the base of most new Seattle towers I’d still argue they made the right decision. – SLP]
So if such architecture is widely unappealing or tacky (even in PE’s eyes) why will the new Ninth Street Garage look like a postmodern version of its predecessor?
By similar standards of cheap cornices, the new garage built to imitate the Century is really tacky. I’m sure the OPO developers are trying to keep at least a little sense of place intact for this location. But if the aesthetics of the Century were so valued to now be imitated, our City should have obviously tried ways to save the building (and not just a tacky facade front) with true rehab alternatives.
So, just as these Seattle developers likely felt they were doing good for a historic building, the OPO developers likely feel they’re doing their best by “saving” the OPO and building a “sensitive” garage.
that’s really common here in DC because pretty much the entire District is considered Historic. Developers either brace the facade, completely tear out the existing structure – floors, columns and all – and build behind or hire preservation consultants to meticulously dismantle the facade and store it off-site.
Developers were required to at least store and preserve before they were required to incorporate, so I’ve heard there are literally hundreds of “buildings-in-a-box” packed away in warehouses around here.
on one hand I suppose it’s nice to maintain a sense of the fabric, but it can veer dangerously close to Disneyland.
done well where they didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t a collage:
http://www.douglasdevelopment.com/dc01.html
Big problems with both this Seattle building and the Stogel Park’N’Go-Next-Door are proportion and materials. The architects who are trying to be “sensitive” don’t get the big picture right even when some of the details are pleasing. For instance, the window sizes of the Seattle tower are drastically out of scale with the openings on the old building’s walls. I’m not sure what the materials are, but it seems that the new building may be executed in cast concrete, which never looks appropriate next to older materials like terra cotta or limestone.
The idea behind the Seattle building is good but the execution is poor.
The Trivers-designed garage here is a mess of proportion gaffes with its large arch on Ninth Street, narrow corner-shaft windows and horizontal, short openings on Olive and Locust all jarring with each other. Judging from the display stand at Ninth and Olive, its materials –beige stucco and cast concrete above Missouri granite panels that mock the Old Post Office’s base — are going to be so cheap looking that we may begin appreciating the Kiener Plaza garages for their subtlety.
The problems of proportion and materials seem endemic to all speculative architecture, though, not just faux-historic buildings. Architects need better education and more willpower in the face of their crude clients.
I did some reading up on this building, out of curiosity. I found this this pre-demolition photo from May 2003:
http://www.pstos.org/instruments/wa/seattle/bethel-temple_exterior-2003-l.jpg
It looks like ON THE EXTERIOR, the facades were about all that was left of the building that was original, or of any age or construction quality worth hanging onto. What used to be where the dome is now was badly designed, with little attention to the materials, scale, or even color of the original building. But then again, those are exactly the same things that were neglected in the new Cristalla design. And not to mention, a Landmarks board member who toured the property thought that enough of the interior was still intact that the building might be listed in its entireity (http://www.pstos.org/instruments/wa/seattle/bethel-temple.htm#19991122). It still had its bleachers, its original chandelier, pool tile edging, doors from the former dressing rooms, and structural elements which supported the original ceiling over the pool. The only reason that the property (which the church had already nominated, strangely enough) was not ultimately listed is that in Seattle, if a property is owned by a church, they get preemptive say over whether a building can be landmarked or not. Hence, the wrecking ball.
One of the articles I read (here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=10383) said that the neighborhood where the Crystal Pool is, Belltown, was rezoned in the 1970s to permit construction of office and condo towers, making it one of only a few areas in Seattle where this is allowed. So, this is hot downtown real estate where developers are just achin’ to slap up rubber stamped condo towers. I guess I’m glad they at least saved the facades, if the effect on foot is as nice as you say it is. But still, when I’m walking around the city I do look up to see what’s above me, and I do look at the canyon effect of the buildings ahead of me down the street…. And this building looks like your standard bland, cheaply constructed condo tower slapped on top of the remnants of a perfectly good historic building. After the 3rd floor or so, they didnÂ’t even try to reference or respect the original structure in any way. ItÂ’s just the same cheap blue glass box thatÂ’s rapidly infesting booming urban areas all around America right now. I donÂ’t see why it deserves fanfare—the business journal quoted above may like it, but business journals arenÂ’t exactly known for their critical eye towards development (StL Business Journal & Century Building Memorial Parking Garage, anyone?).
While I might favor a well-composed facadectomy in the case of a building that truly had no guts left (Some earlier posters suggested that this building may have been in such shape, burned out or the like), that’s not the condition that the Crystal Pool was in. I think it’s dangerous to think about historic buildings (or any buildings) as just facades and no more. That kind of thinking can lead to nasty treatment of beautiful spaces—just think of the foul gutting of Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in Downtown St. Louis. The State of Missouri treated that building like it was just a facade, and now all the elaborate metal grilles and the marvelous polychrome stencilwork have been replaced by white drywall. Similar guttings have taken place all over Downtown—try walking into the coffin-like, 1980s-rehabbed lobby of the St. Louis Design Center on Locust next time you’re over there. That building was also treated as if it was just a facade, and, um, ICK.
We need to consider the whole building in our preservation and design decisions. ItÂ’s great to preserve a historic, close-to-the-sidewalk terra cotta facade, but that doesnÂ’t mean that its interior spaces and the spaces above your immediate eye level should be neglected. We do live in a 3D world, afterall.
What is most sad is that most citizens and visitors to Seattle will think what an improvement this is…
What is unfortunate is that it will be seen by passerbys at speeds of less than 60 MPH… as well as it is too urban to effectively let ivy cover its facade.
Richard, being a man of poignant words, hit a bulls-eye, its ugly. As if often the result of buildings or spaces designed by committee–mediocrity is the outcome. The core of Seattle has many fine buildings from the first half of the 20th century, much like Saint Louis.
Hopefully Seattle’s civic leaders will have the spine to recognize this building’s shortcomings and the courage to demand more than this Disney or Vegas style architecture in the future.
[REPLY – As much as Seattle has going for it attractive design is typically not one of them. Many buildings are dryvit or mirrored glass. Based on the other new towers in the area this is certainly one of the better examples – like it or not. – SLP]