With Glass House, Owen Richards Architects Adds to Revamp of Seattle Center

So the latest hullabaloo is over the Wright family proposal to build a Chihuly glass house where the Fun Forest once misspent idle youth–the news made the USA Today, for heaven’s sake. The lesson seems to be that if you say you’ll pay for construction, you can build whatever you like at Seattle Center.

A glorified Chihuly gift shop/restaurant was on no one’s top ten list for the Center–well, except for Dale Chihuly and the Wrights, apparently, where it was number one with a putti.

Mossback crawled out from beneath a seed log to make the point that the Center has never been all that high-toned–that was in defense of Chihuly, by the way. On the City Council, Sally Bagshaw said, What about our Central Park plan? Mayor McGinn said, It makes money? And Council President Richard Conlin plumped squarely for a Central-Parkesque open space with a glass house in it.

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Here and there, Seattle Center is sporting more and more the handiwork of Owen Richards Architects. A principal with LMN on the McCaw Hall renovation, Owen Richards has since come back twice to make improvements on the Hall’s cafe and to create SIFF Cinema. It’s also the firm chosen for the SIFF Group Film Center on Center campus.

Now the firm has been tapped for the glass house project. I’d rather see someone tackle the real white elephant on Center grounds, the hulking ex-armory Center House, which has the effect of making any cultural celebration held there feel vaguely Stalinesque. It’s the heart of the campus, and what everything else relates to. It seems odd simply to plunk things down around it, in the hope that when something is finally done with it, it will “work” with everything else.