At architecture school, a fellow student once justified a column in every room as a "friend". Hum. Column as a friend. Freudian slip? Solution to alienation?

When picking up softball bases at Richard Meier's office in the 80's, I witnessed a terrible battle between the junior architects and a NYC fire marshal. The proposed columns in the hallway infringed on the minimum dimension. After a many frustrating minutes, the aging fire marshal yelled at the young designers, "Have you ever seen people panic in a fire!?"

In our dim memories, wasn't Post-Modernism just an argument about the size and shape of columns?

It's all too easy. The column has a majestic history in the architecture. From Greek temples to the Miesen office building, the column has been the first wave of architectural order. The column supports the primitive hut and Western formal analysis of architecture. In my architectural upbringing, to not understand the column is to be without spatial organization; to live in anarchy.

To compare and contrast four new institutional buildings by our more respected firms, I have focused on the column and sunscreen. The column is for its intellectual rigor and the "can you believe its in Seattle" sunscreen is for its complete nonsense. Insanely, each one is made of slats or perforations guaranteeing their true function to keep the water dripping after the rain stops. Do we love the rain that much?

Law School: The Seattle University Law School by Olson-Sundberg Architects in association with Yost Grube Hall at 12^th Ave and Columbia.

Police Precinct: The West Precinct of the Seattle Police Department by Weinstein-Copeland Architects at 8^th Avenue and Virginia.

University Research: The University of Washington Oceanography Building by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson at 15^th Ave NE and NE Boat Street.

Community Facility: The New Holly Neighborhood Campus by ARC Architects at South Myrtle and 32^nd Ave South.

Law School: The best modern space. A lovely feeling is created by natural light drifting and blasting through the huge atrium. With simple coordinated transformations of section and plan of the main circulation path, each floor gains a unique personality generated by the light. As a follow-up to the Frey Museum renovation, Olson-Sundberg has proven themselves "masters of light." A very rare ability.

Police Precinct: The best elevations. I love looking at the building. Ed Weinstein's 90's modernist vocabulary is definitely "deco". The patterns of night light, the steel plate decoration and the soaring elegant brackets create the complimentary solidity and "aspiring" lightness of the deco era.

University Research: Best figurative space. On the second floor, the visitor enters through the fish's tail and ascends into an almost rapturous fish shaped space. Brilliantly, Peter Bohlin abandons the traditional skylight and caps the atrium with a dark flat ceiling, which like the false domes of neo-classicism, appears lighter than air.

Community Facility: Best siting. Stan Lokting has proven that the Tukwila Community Center was no fluke. He knows how a building can grasp the site and sit proudly in it. He is not afraid to make a building with a capital "B" and that feels great.

Law School: Full set of traditional uses of the column. In the main, the oversized (i.e. mannered) round columns are set back from the edge as the lightweight wall hang from the cantilevered floor slab. A row of monumental columns with decorative capitol flanks the atrium. As the atrium balconies setback, the columns change from round, to square and to round again. I don't know why.

Police Precinct: Most mannered columns. Weinstein utilizes the spatial grid, but ghosts the columns in the concrete block walls. On the south face, the first floor concrete block columns transform into windows on the second floor, abandoning its structural role for one of visual patterning.

University Research: Weird columns. Lumpy textured columns form a freely shaped colonnade or porch on the ground plane. The main columns of the façade are blended into the exterior wall, which is a valiant, but failed attempt, to make a "textured" weaving of metal and glass that is beautiful and artistically convincing.

Community Facility: Column as object. The columns are sonatube objects that seem consistent in diameter no matter its height or use. They are capital-less sculptures whether in a row or singly. The entrance column at each building is an identity marker and stand like soldiers animating the plaza.

Law School: Why equal sunscreens facing east, west and south? Because they are the decorative elements to the façade and to remove them would leave a harsh and ugly building. But, only Olson-Sundberg used the sunscreen to bounce light onto the interior's ceiling.

Police Precinct: Beautiful cornice. The sunscreens are the crown to the building's composition and spirit providing scales both large and small. (And the dripping water will refresh the roses below)

University Research: Quirky and useless facing only southwest. (See note below*)

Community Facility: Purple. Like the Law School and Police Precinct, the screens have become the main decorative elements on these institutional buildings. Why in Seattle?

If most Seattle architects avoid the post-modern, deconstruction and retro-modern international dialogues, at least they should establish for themselves clean rules of architectural thinking. The column and sunscreen reveal a lack of intellectual rigor that should be corrected - at least by the next generation.

For further information on Peter Bohlin: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson

For text reproduction rights to the article above, contact: Arcade Magazine

Back to the index: Critical Writing Index