Venturi, Scott Brown and the Seattle Art Museum

In Praise of SAM

Forget Function. Architecture becomes art when the building is great to be in and look at. And here in the Northwest the emphasis is definitively on the "be in" side of the equation. The Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall and the Mariners’ Safeco Field have won the admiration of tens of thousands as exceptional places to hear music or watch baseball—and to be in. Hardly anyone comments on Benaroya’s sandstone or Safeco’s brick façade.

On the other hand, striking buildings to look at, such as Seattle Center’s Experience Music Project, with its loud colors and potato shapes, have routinely been rejected before they are even finished. In the 1950s, neighbors actually protested against talented visual architects like Seattle’s own Robert Riechert, designer of the famous wedge house on Lakeview Drive East.

In the 1980s a brave Seattle Art Museum decided to take a huge number of risks all at once: moving to a down-and-out, unrevived downtown; putting the building (and the Museum) to a vote of the citizens and reaching out across the world to commission an artist/architect for the first time in Seattle history. Today, downtown is revived, citizens pack the museum, but the artist/architect is ignored.

Ask a hundred Seattleites about the design of SAM and you will get blank stares, followed by "I never thought about it before." The building sparks no sense of greatness because of a communal prejudice that new great buildings must be modern in style. New great buildings should evoke the future.

The dilemma is that world-renowned architect Robert Venturi, with his partner Denise Scott Brown, gave Seattle a great building to look at, unfortunately for them, in a town without eyeballs. Venturi, who spent a lifetime fighting blind love for the modern style, received the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architecture (the Pritzker Prize) the year he gave Seattle SAM. Now, as the museum ponders expansion, I invite you to look again.

Use your eyes and look at SAM and the city around it. Start with the vibrant cascade of red arches and gables that carry the eye up and down the hill of University Street. Look around. There is little brilliant color elsewhere. The other buildings just sink into the hill. Venturi and Scott Brown’s flows with the hill like rapids.

Move closer and look at the tile. Green, black and mustard leaves crown the columns like flames on a candle. Strings of black dots on white half-cylinders accentuate the arches. Delicate steel columns with blue and yellow tulip capitals mark the doorway to the café.

The sandstone cladding on University Street is nearly windowless (SAM required no sunlight in the galleries), but comfortable with the adjacent historic buildings. In the tradition of pop art, the architects utilized the monumental letters and images of American highway advertisements. The giant carved "SEATTLE ART MUSEUM" exploits the conflict between good and bad taste, and is now frequently copied on new civic structures, including Safeco Field.

SAM is deceptively small. It is only the width and the height of Benaroya Hall’s glass lobby across the street. To achieve a feeling of monumentality, Venturi invented a mini-forest of thick stone columns just inside the front door on First Avenue. Also, the curved end of the great hail is an old architect’s trick, designed to fool the eye into perceiving the space as much larger than it is.

The grand hail is unlike any other in Seattle. Look up and examine the baffle of hanging things that are like theatrical curtains and sturdy arches. Brazenly, the baffle is deep yellow in one direction and deep orange in the other. Is it a circus tent or a cathedral? It’s America. It’s both.

The first requirement of SAM’s decision to expand the museum in the next 10 to 20 years should be that the next architect celebrate and protect the artistic integrity of the Venturi and Scott Brown building as a masterwork, part of the museum’s collection of 20th century art. To this writer, the greatest act of respect would be not a "sensitive addition," but another distinct building wedged between SAM and the Arcade Building: a cacophony of color filling the eye.

Seattle Magazine

December, 1999

In 2000, this article was awarded the First Prize for Magazine Editorials by the Northwest Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists