A conversation with Seattle
Berger is right to call for due diligence in inspecting funding assumptions, and he’s half-right about using Seattle Center as a cautionary tale–it may be called “Seattle Center” but when it comes to funding maintenance and improvements, the City of Seattle generally runs the other way.
But to call what James Corner Field Operations is designing a “park” is like calling a space shuttle a “thermal tiling system.”
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This is what Friedman highlighted in Corner’s work in his introduction: the way Corner has found parallels between ecological process and infrastructure, the way his work generates a self-awareness in communities by making their patterns explicit. So when Corner talks about the juxtaposition of urbanism and nature, it’s not with the notion of any essential distinction: the urban has arisen from nature, from similar processes.
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After Corner’s presentation last November, the City Council began the process of throwing cold water on Corner’s vision, largely from an budgetary perspective. Now the Pike Place Market is joining in: “Market Executive Director Ben Franz-Knight said he and other Market supporters were worried that visitors would stream down a grand promenade to the waterfront and not ‘come back for lunch or dinner,'” reports the Seattle Times.
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“The Applicant proposes to install a sky wheel on the waterward end of the pier. The wheel foundation consists of eight legs radiating from a central axle. The wheel is approximately 175 feet in diameter and will be positioned in a generally perpendicular orientation to Alaskan Way. The structural legs will be mounted on steel plate foundations that tie into steel trusses mounted above the pier support. The wheel will support approximately 41 gondolas, which will be fully enclosed, and air conditioned, obviating the need for open-able windows and preventing any falling objects.”
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Now, “nothing in this presentation is final or fixed, it continues to evolve,” Corner emphasized at the presentation–we are still very much in an illustrative and iterative phase, where ideas are offered, feedback is taken, and they evolve, or perhaps just disappear. So far, the public baths are hanging in there. (“They’d be managed,” Corner explained. “We presented that idea a little naively.” “Oh, no, I’m for them,” I told him. “Well, we’re not holding a vote,” he retorted, to which I wanted to reply, That’s what you think, buddy! This is Seattle. There will be a series of votes.)
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“If you squint your eyes,” said James Corner at the initial design presentation for Seattle’s central waterfront, “this, too, almost has a sort of circularity, where it’s embracing and enclosing the city and looking out to water bodies. […] It’s really a device to bring together a sense of the collective and focus it.”
He was talking about the Olmsted Legacy, Seattle’s park system, and how he hopes to recapitulate that with an Elliott Bay ring. “Seattle has in a sense turned its back on Elliott Bay over years,” Corner argued, “it’s now going to become a frontage.”
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