James Corner Puts in His Thumb, Pulls Out Seattle Waterfront Commission
It turns out I made good use of my time by leaving last week’s waterfront design presentation just after James Corner had a go. Today the City of Seattle announced that James Corner Field Operations (unsic) would be lead designer for the central waterfront project.
JCFO is a New York firm, but on this project it has eleven collaborators, four of which are based in Seattle: Mithun, The Berger Parnership, Herrera Environmental Consultants, and Jason Toft, who is a person and not really a firm.
Coming up next, says the Department of Planning and Development:
The City will select the project manager and engineering team for the Central Waterfront project next week. Design work will begin in October 2010 with a conceptual design expected in 2012 and a final design to be delivered in 2015. Construction is scheduled from 2016 to 2018.
A few things impressed me about Corner, most notably his evident desire to create something people talk about–(review “high line” on Google Trends)–and enjoy, whether or not they could articulate that desire.
His references to his native Manchester’s working class and Seattle’s working waterfront felt like a requisite attempt to establish bona fides, as were put-downs about homogenization, but I was struck more by his off-the-cuff observations (one about how Seattle was “immersed in weather” suggested an early and important realization that this isn’t San Diego).
He also won an audible gasp from the audience by suggesting something he called “early wins”–which simply meant to get started with small installations that could go up while more long-term work was underway. A member of his team on the High Line got laughs by noting, as an aside, that it was something “people” thought was cool far sooner than city leadership.
On that note, his presentation ended, cannily, with a video of interviews his team had done with Seattleites down at the waterfront, asking what they’d like to see there.
You could see it as a sop to democracy or, taking it seriously–which I don’t imagine anyone did, public comment is not for listening to–you could see that it also made a point: Seattleites wanted a waterfront that was quiet, family friendly, lively with things to do, and connected to the city. To paraphrase Queen, we want it all, and we want it now. (The lyrics “Gotta get me a game plan, gotta shake you to the ground” seem apropos too, for that matter.)
New York’s High Line aside, you might be more interested to know of JCFO’s work in Baltimore, with the Westport redevelopment there, mixed-use with a park waterfront; or Korea’s Chuncheon G5 project. Both of these are substantially larger than the 20-acre footprint JCFO has to work with in Seattle, but illustrate that bucolic swaths are not what JCFO means by “green.” And that “park” has many meanings.
Corner mentioned how functional things that look like park-like elements can be, if they are tied together and tied into their urban surroundings–if you do it right, you can get a massive water-filtration device out of it, which is not an irrelevant point given that Seattle’s waterfront looks out on a very sick Puget Sound. When people ask what’s wrong with the waterfront now, there’s that. But the question Corner wants to answer is simply, What’s amazing about the waterfront that we haven’t thought of yet? He’s not a real New Yorker, but he might be just pushy enough to get us there.
