The Pinevue Apartment Building, and why it is worth saving

The heritage structures along Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor house mixed use, residential, and commercial tenants. The most prominent and best preserved of these buildings are the large number of former auto showrooms, the so-called auto-row buildings that are comprised of large-span ground floor spaces with high ceilings. Some heritage structures originally housed, as they do today, a mix of uses with ground floor retail and housing above. Some are strictly residential. These original patterns of development, or more specifically the pattern or planning for the building’s use, are reflected in their elevations. In those buildings along Pike-Pine that were originally commercial, the ground floor has expansive amounts of glass which are crisply framed by the building’s structure, with the resulting clarity carried out on the upper floors with little variation. A typical example of this rational, commercial frame expression can be seen along Pine Street, between Crawford Place and Summit Avenue.

Typical Pike-Pine Heritage Commercial Building

Capitol Hill’s residential buildings too, have a similar uniformity of expression between the ground and upper floors. In residential buildings, the expression was one of smaller, individually framed or so-called ‘punched’ windows, with the apartment building on Pine Street and Belmont being a fine example.

Typical Pike-Pine Heritage Apartment Building

A unified expression between a building’s base and top was clearly not the primary goal for the designers of Pine Street’s Pinevue Apartments, making it a rarity among our heritage buildings. Next to the Melrose Building (home to Bauhaus), and threatened by the same re-development project, I would argue that architecturally the Pineview Apartments are just as significant, and just as worthy of preservation as is Melrose. Unlike the above mentioned typical Pike-Pine buildings, Pinevue presents us with a unique expression between lower and upper floors – an interesting merging of the expression of ground floor frame (commercial) and upper floor punched opening (residential). And though there are other buildings on the Hill that seek a strong distinction between base and top, none shows the same level of determination in differentiating their two uses as does the Pinevue.

The Pinevue Building

The Pinevue’s ground floor columns bear little resemblance to — or provide ordering for — the upper floors’ rather randomly spaced and grouped punched openings. This singular expression of the columns is furthered not only by the white of their terra-cotta but also by their framing the black painted storefront, not to mention being quite different than the dark red brick above. The fact that the columns are just slightly in front of (proud of) the brick is a wonderful detail that clearly punctuates the difference between base and top.

Pinevue Corner with Terr-Cotta Column

Retail Interior (Wall of Sound & Spine and Crown)

Despite these larger design moves that emphatically state the difference between commercial and residential uses, the Pinevue’s architects also looked to provide some unity to the upper and lower floors, but in a much more subtle way than one typically encounters along Pike-Pine, and in a way that did not conflict with the overall goal of programmatic differentiation. The small divided lights above the storefronts (especially handsome when seen from inside the retail spaces) are repeated on the residential windows above, whose terra-cotta sills are a match to the material of the columns below.  Another nice detail that weaves together the entire Pine Street façade is the crenelations along the parapet that are of similar dimension – but different materiality – than the terra-cotta columns that they line up with below. This confident uniting of what on the larger canvas are disparate parts with the smallest of details reveals a level of sophistication and maturity by the Pinevue’s architects that make this building one of the Hill’s finest buildings (as well as presenting a lesson for restraint for us to treasure and advocate for).

Angled Storefront

The Pinevue’s intact original retail design leaves no question that it was built expressly for smaller tenants, tenants that it continues to successfully house to this day. The architectural clues are abundant, and include numerous doors framed by a rarely seen diagonally oriented storefront, complete with the requisite delicate corners. These angle storefronts have served the tenants well, as they provide greater visibility of their wares to passersby, and stand in contrast to the typical, larger, and planar storefront retail spaces along Pike-Pine. The Melrose Building also has it original storefronts intact, resulting in an entire block-frontage of intact heritage structures with no significant sign of alteration, speaking to the ability of this quality pair of buildings to continue to successfully attract retail tenants throughout their almost 100 year histories. A noteworthy achievement indeed.

Melrose Building and Pinevue Building

The Common House - The Heart of a Cohousing Community

Design matters. In the design of cohousing, intention also matters. What sets cohousing apart from other types of conventional housing models - whether it is single family neighborhood, condominiums, or apartments - is that in cohousing, there is a physical space that is the heart of the community, and that space is the Common House. It is the stage in which community life (and intention) plays itself out.

While most common houses have the same programmatic elements - a dining room, kitchen, kids play room, and laundry, I would argue that they are not all created equal. The success of a Common House results from the careful juxtaposition of the above programmatic spaces and how they relate to each other. And the intentionality behind the design of each room also lends to the success. After having visited over 80 cohousing communities in the past 8 years my measure of a successful common house is how often its rooms are used by the community. During my visits to cohousing communities I have seen some rooms that were seemingly well designed, but were reported by residents to have received little usage due to poor acoustics, lack of visual connection, uncomfortable furniture, poor lighting, etc.

I have also seen rooms that were clearly designed as a "multi-purpose" space - and therefore, it serves no single purpose well. I acknowledge that space is often a premium in cohousing (either due to physical constraints or budget) and that the Common House needs to support a diversity of programmatic uses – large events, community dinners, canning of summer harvest, a musical combo. I would argue that a well-designed Common House will contain rooms that are well suited for the uses programmed for a given space while still allowing future flexibility for how that space might be adapted for another use.

How is this achieved? Through careful application of patterns - as enumerated by Christopher Alexander in his seminal book A Pattern Language. In 2006, I used Alexander's book as the basis of codifying the essential elements of Common House Design and created some additional patterns that I felt were important to better accommodate the intentionality of cohousing communities as I had observed in Denmark. It was apparent that the Danes had been more concerned about the specific uses of each space and not so much on each space needing to satisfy a litany of multi-purposes. And thus, their Common Houses had an air of hygge that is less frequently found in the Common Houses I have experienced in North America.

Designing the Cohousing Common House is the title of the book I wrote to document my findings of Danish Common Houses. The book includes, in addition to my own, Alexander’s patterns. My book has been requested by architects designing their first cohousing community, students researching cohousing, and residents who are planning for the design of their common house - these requests have come from across the US, as well as from Poland, Australia, Belgium, and England.  It is available for purchase by contacting Schemata Workshop.

In addition to the book, and if you are interested in learning more, I would encourage you to attend my workshop on Common House Design at the National Cohousing Conference in Oakland, CA. 1-5pm on June 15, 2012.

Daybreak Cohousing gets its first art!

[caption id="attachment_3664" align="aligncenter" width="687" caption="Daybreak's mural"][/caption] When we designed Daybreak Cohousing, the residents wanted to incorporate some art on the buildings.  However, as the project progressed, there was neither time or budget to create the pieces prior to move in so it was decided to wait until the residents moved in.  The railing system was designed to allow for replacement of wire mesh with art panels.  A concrete wall at the terrace stood ready to receive a mural or artwork.  Blocking was placed at key points on the building facades to receive large hanging pieces – these were structurally reinforced and fully flashed to integrate with the exterior siding. [Then] Daybreak resident and graphic artist Maura Jess conceived and designed the mural inspired by two pottery pieces created by fellow Daybreak resident and ceramic artist Scot Cameron-Bell. Scot later joined the project and transferred the design outline to the wall and the two artists then worked closely with other residents to paint the image over a 2-week period, Scot applying the final artistic touches.. So, after almost 2 years the first piece has been installed!  Click here to see photos of the process, including the inspiration for the piece.

Create Communities of Opportunity

  On March 23^rd, members of Schemata Workshop attended the Housing Development Consortium (HDC) 4^th Annual Luncheon; HDC is a professional association and advocate for providing affordable housing in King County. Schemata Workshop is a sponsor and member of HDC and we are advocates for their cause. At the luncheon we were fortunate enough to have Angela Glover Blackwell, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PolicyLink, as the keynote speaker. Her speech was so inspiring that we were compelled to take notes summarizing the key components to create communities of opportunity.

First, Angela described the St. Louis, MO community where she grew up and how the neighborhood children played together in the front yards and streets without fear of danger. A community where her mother anxiously watched, perched out on the front porch, as she made her way to the corner store for the first time. It was an economically diverse community of doctors and lawyers living next to the single parent receiving food stamps. It was a community that fostered opportunity.

However, not all of our society experienced the same upbringing as Angela and members of our society have children that run the risk of not succeeding to their full potential. As Angela said, in these economic times, this is the first time that children are not expected to have the same opportunities as their parents. In addition, she emphasized that one’s housing determines so much more than we think. It determines the type of education and healthcare one can receive; also it determines what types of jobs are available. Those who work on housing and housing policies are indirectly working on health, education and job policies as well.

After painting the picture of an excellent community and emphasizing the need and importance of successful housing, Angela began to identify the key components to create communities of opportunity.

Creating Communities of Opportunities – 5 steps

1. Place matters

• Creating a sense of place contributes to a sense identity for the community

2. Access to reliable transit

• Provides the opportunity to seek better jobs, health care, and education

3. Integrate income levels and promote racial diversity

• Provides richness of life and opportunity

4. Sustainability

• Provide all 3 components of sustainability – environmental, social, economic equity

5. Inclusion

• Integrate yourself in the community to understand their needs

The key components to create communities of opportunity are not new ideas individually, but we often forget that we need to take into account all components to provide successful housing. Angela ended her speech with the statement “Don’t be nostalgic for a time that never was.” However, I think we can use nostalgia to create goals for achieving communities of opportunity.

Seattle Asian Art Musuem -- Art Deco Splendor in Volunteer Park (Part 1 of 2)

The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park is a splendid building housing a magnificent collection of ancient and contemporary art. Designed by the Seattle firm Bebb and Gould (designers of many noteworthy structures in Seattle, including many prominent homes on Capitol Hill) and built in 1933, it originally housed the entire collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Set within Volunteer Park, SAAM shares its museum-in-the-park setting with other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose home is in New York City’s Central Park. As private collections predated by centuries those offered for public view, the museum-in-the-park typology finds precedent in that of the manor house in the landscape of either a noble’s estate in Europe or that of the landed elite of the East coast of the United States. Both the museum and the public garden are places of leisure, and their pairing is sensible, for sure, and allows for a full day’s outing both in and out-or-doors. In this tradition, SAAM and Volunteer Park present no less compelling a pairing than their historic or big city predecessors.

Art-deco (approximately the style in which SAAM was designed), to my mind, has always had a somewhat precarious and undervalued place within the history of modernist design. It never garnered the serious attention paid to many other 20th century movements, because it was seen, perhaps, as only a pleasant if not too serious ‘scenic’ detour along the thoroughfare of the more rigorous, international style modernism that eclipsed it. Architects, especially, like to see modernism as the built manifestation of industrialization and of the Enlightenment’s goal of human progress. Modernism’s emphasis on functionality, abstraction, and a machine aesthetic are well known. While modernist, art deco was perhaps too populist an expression of modernism’s machine aesthetic ideology, leading to deco’s being ultimately and sadly dismissed by ‘serious’ practitioners and their academies in favor of more somber fare. Ironically, deco’s embellishment with organic motifs and stylized figures doomed it to a short life even if those embellishments were crafted in the same materials, precision, means of that modernism propounded. Given its rather short life and relatively meager legacy, we are fortunate indeed to have such a building as SAAM, and that it is open to all to relish in.

Among modern materials aluminum figures prominently, including in many art deco designs such as at SAAM.  While not a new material, aluminum’s manufacturing costs had been significantly reduced by the late 19th and early 20th century making it more readily available (until then, it was priced as was silver).  As important to its new, ready availability, was aluminum’s light-weight, corrosion resistance, and excellent casting characteristics -- the perfect combination of qualities for the ornamental metal work sought by art deco architects. Add to that the fact these qualities allowed it to be utilized in its pure and visually uncompromised form (by being either polished or clear anodized – not painted) and you have the almost perfect ‘new’ material for the ‘new’ architecture, with no Seattle example better (art deco or otherwise) than in the spectacular aluminum screens and doors that comprise the entry at SAAM. With its organic motifs, shininess, and casting precision, the entry screen ranks among the best architectural features of any building in our city. And, dare I say, many an architect’s current fetish with screening and de-materializing could learn much from the effectiveness of SAAM’s entry screens in achieving those same qualities, the full effectiveness of which are realized best upon entry into SAAM (so go ahead, go in!).

Upon entering SAAM, one is impressed by a lobby that is of a grandeur befitting not only the institution itself, but also of the powerful design vocabulary offered by art deco. Still in a relatively early stage of modernism, art deco had to resolve many new and modern functional requirements, oftentimes without the off-the-shelf products available to today’s practitioners. Things that are now easily ordered from a vendor’s product line were either unavailable or were sufficiently rare enough that the architect had to design those elements themselves. In the skillful hands of SAAM’s architects, such commonalities as air grills, light fixtures, clocks, or doors became objects d’art in-and-of themselves, and are a testament to a comprehensiveness of design mostly absent from today’s buildings. While it is true that standardization has made such objects much more attainable (and therefore useful), there is something lamentable in this loss of design-in-depth. There is no escaping the observation that despite their adding of flourishes to such functional objects, there is an underlying and guiding reliance on streamlined aesthetic resulting from industrial manufacture – an aesthetic that (is essentially the same and) holds its own against a more ideologically correct modernism.

This being art deco, there is more to see than stylized architectural furnishings in SAAM. Gold foil, polished and richly veined marbles, and of course, curved surfaces abound. Despite this potentially chaotic assemblage of luxurious materials and forms, there is a skill in their assembly at SAAM that creates not only sumptuous spaces, but adds a dignity and refinement befitting of the art contained within -- which is the focus of the next post -- the architecture of the galleries themselves.