It’s not open yet, but Seattle’s giant waterfront Ferris Wheel–175 feet in diameter–has already won a place in Seattleites’ hearts, and in 449 Twitter feeds (follow along @SeaFerrisWheel). There’s a fan page on Facebook, and this informational page. The Grand Opening is set for Friday, June 29th, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at around 5 p.m., so mark your calendars. Tickets are expected to be around $12 $13 for adults, less $8.50 for children.
For those of you with vertigo, Great Western Pacific, Inc., also runs a carousel right next door, so you have your choice.
GWP’s Hal Griffith is looking prescient now–he proposed the giant Ferris Wheel back in 2010, as an incentive to get people to visit the waterfront despite the disruption of the Viaduct’s replacement. As he told the Puget Sound Business Journal then, “Everybody on the waterfront is in for some tough sledding. The whole idea is that this wheel will be a meaningful enough attraction to get people to come down here even though it’s a little more difficult than it used to be.”
Now, the Seattle Times is running exactly that story–“Tunnel work cuts into waterfront business“–while Griffith’s Ferris Wheel is basking in anticipatory publicity.
Hadn’t you heard? Seattle’s getting a ferris wheel! And ingridtaylar‘s lovely sunset-swathed image only further entices us to venture down to pier 57 come July.
James Corner, at a waterfront design meeting (Photo: MvB)
In the midst of James Corner Field Operations‘ work visualizing a new waterfront for Seattle (our coverage: posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), head man James Corner took time out for a talk for the Seattle Architecture Foundation.
It was part of their Design In Depth series; the Foundation is also behind many of those walking tours you hear about that criss-cross Seattle, visiting architectural points of interest. (They also have youth programs, if you have a little builder on your hands.)
The weather had brought April showers the night of the talk, and the recital hall at Benaroya Hall was not quite full. Corner, who’s had SRO turn-outs at most of his waterfront events, took note. “They told me a little rain didn’t stop Seattleites,” he said, and you could imagine an X appearing next to a mental FALSE box, as many of you were found wanting. (Prior to the talk, Corner was in conversation with the University of Washington’s Dean Daniel Friedman, when an acquaintance administered a lavish hug to Friedman. “Seattleites!” exclaimed Corner, shifting back. “The hugging!”)
The evening turned out to be a retrospective of sorts, as Corner used his firm’s past projects to map out his design philosophy–though philosophy is probably not quite the right word. Corner would go on to call out Louis Kahn’s 1953 mapping of Philadelphia streets‘ movement patterns, a kind of hydrological study of roads, and in his appreciation of Kahn’s insight you get an insight into Corner, too, and his motivations. “In depth” is a great title of an Corner talk, because he wants to flip your perspective from surface to deeper structures, structures of process: traffic flow, rather than roads, per se.
Work is already underway on a bike/pedestrian overpass linking Lower Queen Anne to the waterfront (Photo: MvB)
Corner told us and, separately, the Los Angeles Times‘ Christopher Hawthorne that his childhood is perhaps the setting for his primary influence in landscape architecture: the “tough working-class urbanism in Manchester juxtaposed with some amazing wild nature.” There was no disguising the delight he felt in finding that creative tension in the Seattle waterfront project. Blocks from downtown’s skyscrapers, Elliott Bay laps at Seattle’s edge, while just south, huge orange cranes offload freighters. Don’t worry, he assured everyone, he was not planning on “prettying” everything up.
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. In some ways the contrasts are the more striking because of their mirroring.
Hawthorne calls it Corner’s gift for “romantic, post-industrial drama,” the emblem of which is grass poking up through the rusty railroad tracks of The High Line (and worries that Corner’s Santa Monica parks project is going to offer little in the way of post-industrial theatre. It must be the first time that anyone has spoken enviously of Fresh Kills’ “complex history“). But after listening to Corner for several months, I think it’s necessary to realize that his conception of “theatrical” is paired to environment, not opposed to it. (In Seattle, one proposed waterfront feature is a “cloud” of mist that would appear on demand.)
Seattle's working waterfront, to the north of downtown (Photo: MvB)
This is an attitude we admit when we declare the Cascades and the Seattle skyline both to be “scenic.” And there’s something to be said for understanding how both are instances of upthrust. In his talk, Corner kept raiding the work of other architects (Koolhaas, Lloyd Wright, Corbusier) for illustrations of architectural reframing of past conflicts. What is a city park? Can series create a sustaining matrix? In the art of Rauschenberg, said Corner, he saw the attempt to organize “found” events on a flat surface, an idea much in parallel with the functional geometries of architecture, some of which are also “found” events.
This kind of systems syncretism may be commonplace for a landscape architect, though Corner’s popularity might just as well argue otherwise. As Corner explained it, it’s the scale of landscape architecture that forces “big picture” systems thinking upon you. You have to break the project down into chunks, while still retaining their relationships. Because a landscape is always doing something before you get there–channeling water, wind, light–you can’t hope to impose major changes without seeing environmental responses. You’re tinkering with an engine you can’t shut off.
As Corner might put it, any surface is both performative and adaptive. At Fresh Kills Park, he had four square miles of Staten Island to work with, with landfill hills up to 400 feet tall (puffed up by methane which will one day be all bled off, leading the hills to subside). That surface provides both room for frisbee fields and wetlands restoration. But in Corner’s design, the park is not just a location, but a process for generating the soil the area is lacking. It’s a “time-based, sequential methodology,” explained Corner, which requires a change of mindset for people who are used to looking at design plans that elide time. (The English are known for taking the long view on forestry.)
This isn’t a methodology just for parks. Corner’s Field Operations is designing a “Water City” in China called Qianhai. Here the city becomes a biological machine (it’s always a biological machine, actually, the question is how intentionally aware it is). It contains both “water fingers” that stream into the now-choked bay and transit hubs that act as community focal points for each of the neighborhoods. From forestry management, Corner has borrowed a typology of blocks and buildings so that the city can grow without undue specification, but still avoid chaos.
The flip for that last part is Corner’s thought that, just as its better to think of flows than roads, its better to think of a city as nested containers than as “blocks and buildings.” You might say: Provide parameters, not building codes. Again, the surface is performative, doing all of the things a city needs to do, but it’s also adaptive, a machine providing water remediation over its 4,500 acres. Time will tell how design corresponds to reality; at one point, Koolhaas couldn’t wait to get to China to build at speed, but he also got a glimpse of the downside of lax regulation.
Corner saved The High Line for last, and it’s here that you want to pay close attention to romanticizing a nature-reclaimed derelict. While nature was, in fact, busy reclaiming the elevated railway structure, pioneering seeds setting up in waterlogged railroad ties, as Field Operations began work, they discovered that it would be impossible to retain the existing nature: the railbed contained toxics, and the structure itself needed to be waterproofed so that it didn’t leak on private property below. So the whole thing was scraped clean, clad in a waterproof, irrigating skin, and a new “nature” reapplied, with 2,000 species of grasses, perennials, trees, and more that were each suited to the High Line’s microclimates.
Seattle's sculpture park, seen from the waterfront (Photo: MvB)
It’s the most potent example of Corner’s belief that the juxtaposition of the urban and “natural” is naturally fruitful. The High Line is another of his biological machines, and it also brings people to a new awareness of their environment, their neighbors. The fact that people promenade down a railway just underscores the permanence of flow, the transience of modality. (Corner is among those in favor of hanging Jeff Koons’ “Train” above the High Line.)
All of this is very much worth taking into account as the Seattle waterfront design is developed, and Corner begins the laborious process of talking people into his vision of a waterfront machine, at once integral and distinct in performative function. Conversation has so far been largely about “the park”: a place where people will congregate or not. Corner throws out ideas, people pooh-pooh them, depending upon their preferences. But if you revisit his plans in terms of flows and containers, it becomes clearer that he’s leaving space for things to emerge in a park-in-progress.
Fortes fortuna adiuuat, says Terence, but the fortunes of the bold get short shrift in Seattle. In the Seattle Times, the headline is “Proposal to link Market, aquarium may be too ambitious for Seattle.” Our homegrown quotation is less likely to ring through the ages: “We’re not afraid of bold. We love bold. But now we’re trying to make it fit Seattle.”
That’s Marshall Foster, Seattle’s planning director, packing into a short phrase most of what bedevils local attempts at grander creative gestures.
Prior to the opening of the Rem-Koolhaas-designed downtown library, the previous significant “public” architectural symbol was the Space Needle, constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair. You also had, like it or not, mostly not, Chester L. Lindsey Architects’ Columbia Center, the towering black “box the Space Needle came in,” and more recently, Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project.
The apparent lesson in all of this is that you can be as bold as you want, as long as you don’t try to do it with public money. (Perhaps as a reaction to staidness, the boldness of EMP strays right into silliness.)
So it’s with a familiar sinking feeling that you read the Seattle Times saying “local architects and city planners” are pushing back against one of James Corner’s signature moves for the central waterfront design project, which seeks to stitch the downtown and waterfront together after the removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Here’s the situation, described previously:
His “big move,” the Overlook Fold, would extend retail down from Pike Place Market via “permeable” shops that provide some protection from the weather, whether hot or rain-drenched. Think of a more lightweight, modern take on the Market’s stalls, where a greater number of the city’s craftspeople and food vendors could take up residence. Because the slope is there, he’d also throw in climbing walls and slides on the way down, and–theatrical!–have you cross above Alaskan Way on an encased aquarium-river, a gateway to the Sound.
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.)
At Crosscut, David Brewster opined: “The third large park is the grandest of all, and bound to be a tourist mecca. This elaborate open space begins at the Pike Place Market, at Victor Steinbrueck Park, descends the hillside in sweeping set of stairs and terraces, crosses over Alaskan Way to a large open space around the Aquarium, and then continues outward to a rebuilt Pier 62-63 (former home of Summer Nights at the Pier) for more wondrous views westward.”
But 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.
How should the sign read? “Welcome to Seattle! You don’t get to choose where you eat for lunch or dinner, you’re the property of the Pike Place Market. Stay put!” It reminds me a little of Broadway restaurants’ resistance to the notion of a Capitol Hill food-truck corral, which they could only perceive as having a parasitic effect. The idea that foodies might stream into the neighborhood, and that restaurants with roofs and chairs might have some long-term advantage over food trucks in cold, rainy Seattle, seemed not to carry much weight. To hear Broadway’s restaurants tell it, they had absolutely no competitive advantage when it came to someone cooking over a Bunsen burner in trailer. (In some cases, this is, sadly, true.)
Similarly, Pike Place Market, having long benefited from being the “end of the road” for the less mountaineering of tourists, can’t seem to picture tourists streaming up from the waterfront to the Market, now that there would be a much slighter grade, accessible in ways that endless flights of stairs are not. Their bald-faced suggestion that pedestrian access be made as tortuous outside the Market as in the Market proper would be hilarious if it weren’t tinged with so much pathos.
However, even that is not really the issue. The Pike Place Market is not, historically, a power player in Seattle politics, except when fighting for its life. What it is in this instance is cover for a larger, more embarrassing oversight: Seattle hired the boldest architect it could find, James Corner, without figuring out how to afford “bold.” Nothing about the waterfront project, except for the seawall replacement, is funded. Corner’s big ideas would also likely come with commensurate price tags. So, the Design Oversight Committee writes to Corner: “We are … very concerned about the size, impacts, viability and cost of the overlook fold as proposed.”
Note that “size,” “viability,” and “costs” are all ways of saying the same thing: empty pockets.
The 175-foot Niagara Falls Sky Wheel (Photo: Happymercury/Wikipedia)
One thing James Corner’s plans for Seattle’s waterfront redesign didn’t include was a mention of the possibility of a 175-foot Ferris wheel at Pier 57. Marshall Foster, Seattle’s planning director, mentioned to me that Hal Griffith’s Ferris wheel project was still working its way through permitting, back in early November, and now Project #6261693 officially has city approval: Notice of Decision.
Here is what’s envisioned:
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. The waiting line will be managed using portable fencing. The Sky wheel expands existing recreational uses at the site.
Several comments, the city says, were received and most were supportive, which warms the heart. Seattle has been Ferris-wheel-less since the departure of the Fun Forest from Seattle Center grounds. Pier 57’s Griffith hopes that the Sky Wheel will help the waterfront attract visitors during the construction accompanying the replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which will continue through 2016.
“Pier 57 was built in 1902 as a rail-loading facility for a sawmill. It now houses pirate-y trinket shops, seafood restaurants, an antique carousel and other draws that exude touristy whiffs of Yukon’s gold-mining era,” says Seattlepi.com. To his credit, James Corner’s waterfront plans don’t call for sweeping all this lower-brow amusement away. In fact, he’s adopted an “embrace and enhance” strategy, suggesting that the collection of piers host a number of enticements:
The “hot tubs” would be in the Pier 62/63 area, which Corner suggests would benefit from an outdoor roller rink surrounded by food trucks, with an adjacent beer garden. Besides the tubs, there might be a pool with retractable roof, floating platforms for seals, and a kayak launching area. You might reach Piers 54 to 57 via the University Street art walk, passing through stormwater-filtering gardens to a promenade along view spots, looking down the gaps between piers. Stairs act as a grandstand for nature views, or street performance.
“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.” (Watch the presentation here.)
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.” Covering eight districts and tying into 29 streets, the new central waterfront would sit inside a larger ring, giving impetus to the creation of even more connections outside the scope of his project. In the end, Elliott Bay would be a “centerpiece for the city,” a “theater for weather.”
If he’s seen Seattle Opera’s “green” Ring, he gave no sign of it, but even if he tapped into it by accident, epic outdoor theater (and incestuous politicking!) is inarguably what makes Seattle Seattle.
Corner and his team were back in Seattle May 19 with a response to Seattle’s input on defining our waterfront. A few things were clear. On the DO NOT WANT list: view-blocking structures, large-scale private development, huge roads and parking lots, touristy shops. DO WANT: views, parks, outdoor activities, places for public gatherings like markets and festivals.
On Corner’s to-do list: remake the psychology of Seattle as a city on the water, and restructure the city’s mental map so that the waterfront is known as an easy place to get to.
Aware that the waterfront is “poorly serviced with public transit” and also has “parking challenges,” the team is looking at a multimodal access strategy, that may or may not include a First Avenue streetcar, but will definitely include filling in “gaps” that keep frustrate pedestrian access. Priority will be given to pedestrians, though bicyclists get a bike path as well. Alaskan Way will be tree-lined and “fully signalized”–i.e., not a fast trip during tourist season.
Summing up what he’d show the audience, Corner said, “It isn’t a one-liner, it isn’t a singular move, it’s episodic.” He backed off his earlier suggestion that part of the Viaduct could be preserved as a public outlook, saying that the cost of structural reinforcement and safety elements was looking prohibitive. (This is a bit ironic because his work on New York’s High Line Park, reclaiming an elevated structure, is one of the reasons he won the Seattle job.)
But he has not backed off the outlook notion, and, looking at his overall plans, you can see that investing heavily in a single structural element isn’t in the cards. Instead Corner has four areas (“folds”) where he and his team are considering making “some bigger moves.”
The biggest is the Overlook Fold, connecting Victor Steinbrueck Park to the Aquarium. On earlier visits, Corner had mused about the challenge of the height differential between downtown and the waterfront. Here, he’s thinking about attacking the 86-vertical-foot differential directly, with an enormous terraced slope that would cross above Alaskan Way, giving pedestrians views all the way down to Aquarium Plaza. “Beneath” the slope is room for commercial space, storefronts and cafés.
(A note on that “thinking”: “We wanted to make these ideas visible, and compelling, but they are not finished or final.”)
“Down” at the waterfront, he surprised the audience into (delighted?) laughter with thermal pools (aka public hot tubs) at Pier 62/63, in a nod to Seattle’s cooler weather. Corner has always talked about “early wins”–ways to engage people with the waterfront before the project is finished–and this would be one. Some deck chairs, a few pools, and you’d have a chance to see if Seattle is really as Nordic as we like to think when visiting Ballard.
At Colman Dock, Corner wants to take advantage of an existing destination point, and amplify what people do there anyway, which is to take in the water view. He’s suggesting a green rooftop “sun lawn” (think Cal Anderson transplanted), and out front, Colman Dock Gallery, a covered canopy area for small markets and carts. (Interestingly, the transparent canopy roof would channel rainwater like an aqueduct, rather than shed it.)
For the Belltown Balcony, Corner went the other way. Rather than mitigate the bluff, he embraces and extends, creating a public space with a variety of sightlines.
Beneath the balcony is ground-floor room, for use TBD (“storefronts and cafés” are the usual placeholder at this stage of the design phase). At the North End, Corner tries to knit the waterfront to the Sculpture Park, crossing above the railroad tracks to a bike path. This element feels the least developed, but perhaps that’s because the Sculpture Park already exists–all Corner may want to do is allow for a “desire path” that people can use.
Down at Pier 48, he has in mind a Festival Pier, again a green-space viewpoint that would also function as an amphitheater. (I know we said “no view-blocking structures” but is there a way to work a band shell into this? Seattle sorely needs a summer venue for Symphony and Opera performances that could engage a much larger community than a hall can hold.) South of Pier 48 would be rock and gravel beach, pier stumps poking up cinematically.
Other supporting design considerations include a more “dynamic” waterfront edge–Corner is leaning on the seawall team to come up with something less like a wall. He envisions a terraced waterfront that both processes stormwater before it hits the Sound, and also allows people to interact with the tidal flows.
