Schemata Adds Staff

Things continue to be busy here at SWorks, and we have added staff; two permanent and three contract (whom we hope to keep!). As the point of contact for staffing, I feel very fortunate to have been able to recruit so many strong candidates in a competitive job market.  Regardless of status, all are a great fit for the environment we try to craft in our studio; if you have a chance to meet any of them you will surely agree.

Scott Nye comes to us by way of Scottsdale, where he recently finished his MArch at ASU, and has about 5 years of experience. He is a recent Seattle arrival, and lives in Ballard.

Roma Shah is a recent UW MArch/MLArch graduate, and graduated from the University of Florida (my Alma Mater) with an undergraduate in architecture.  She has several years of experience, and has lived in Seattle for six years. Roma lives in Ravenna.

Jeff Hammerquist hails form Caly Poly San Luis Obispo and was a classmate of Emily Woods (go Mustangs!). Jeff grew up in the Puget Sound region.

Troy LaCombe just complete his BSArch from the UW. He is from Louisiana (hence the French surname?), and lives on Capitol Hill.

Last but not least is Elias Gardner, who is shoring up our east-coast contingent (though we are not sure he is as surly as Jeff Busby or me). He attended Williams undergrad, where he received a BFA, and has a MArch from RISD. He too has several years of experience and recently moved to Seattle and lives in Columbia City.

The Schemata staff, less Christopher Palms who is on vacation. 

Park(ing) Day 2013 Success!

Friend Teresa Evans thinks the Schemata Workshop Pollinator Park is a great place to get some work done. 

Urban Bee Company honey bees visiting the park. 

Even Goose, the office dog, gets in the pollinator spirit with butterfly wings. 

Hello Robin brought us habanero chocolate chip cookies. Look for the new bakery opening on 19th this winter. 

Schemata Employee Christopher Palms enjoying a Hello Robin cookie.  

Employee Domonique Juleon takes a break from park(ing) day organizing to enjoy bagel and lox from partners Eltana. 

Capitol Hill residents stop to take a break in the Pollinator Park. Thanks to Regan and Associates for all the great plants that made the park such a great space to hang out in.  

Capitol Hill PARK(ing) Day - FRIDAY SEPT 20

Come check out these four great sustainability themed PARK(ing) Day sites in the Pike Pine and 12th Avenue Corridors. 

Schemata Workshop, Urban Bee Co, and Eltana are highlighting the awesomeness of pollinators and bee hives. Come make cider with the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict and check out a new map of neighborhood fruit trees. Sustainable Capitol Hill will be promoting the Capitol Hill Tool Library and sharing information about Melrose Promenade. The 12th Avenue Stewards and Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences will be discussing community intersections and choices and the park coming to 12th and James Ct.

Visit all four sites and get a free treat from Eltana, discounts from Vino Verite, enter to win a gift certificate to Cherry Street Coffee, and other fun gifts/promotions! 

PARK(ing) Day is an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks.

Saint Mark's Greenbelt

After several unsuccessful years of hoping to come across the St Mark’s Greenbelt during one of my neighborhood walks, I resolved this past spring to make a dedicated effort to find it. Although I had yet to visit it, I imagined the Greenbelt would present a unique environment to enjoy Capitol Hill, and another pathway to connect the highlands of 10th Avenue with the lowlands of Lakeview Drive. Google maps revealed that the Greenbelt is between the Blaine Street hill-climb and St Mark’s Cathedral. I decided to make a bit on a loop of my search, and took the long drop down the Blaine Street hill-climb from 10th Avenue to Lakeview Boulevard, after which I planned to ascend back up to Tenth through the Greenbelt itself.

Scaling our numerous hill-climbs is always enjoyable, and it was nice to actually descend the Blaine Street steps. The hill-climbs are a unique feature of Seattle, and a nice way of being in a public right of way reserved solely for pedestrians, instead of one shared with cars or even bicycles. Carving their way through the landscape, they offer a great perspective on the very edges of what is buildable, and present a distinct character from the side that is on more level ground.

During my loop I happened to pass the Egan House, Historic Seattle’s youngest building. After going down the hill-climb, I had a new appreciation for the Egan House’s bold geometry, reflecting perfectly the slope of the hillside I just descended.

The Lakeview trailhead to the Greenbelt is just south of the Egan House, and starts out rather steeply. The first dozen yards or so were nothing noteworthy, mostly a collection of various camping spots. It was quite another story, however, when I rounded a corner and was presented with the back of the home of one of Capitol Hill’s most illustrious former residents, Sam Hill. Mr. Hill was a railroad executive and promoter of transportation of all kinds in the late 19th and early 20th century (Wikipedia has a nice entry). In the early 20th century, Mr. Hill decided to locate his Seattle residence at the northern edge of the Harvard-Belmont neighborhood. Edge indeed, as the difference between the street side of the house and that of its hillside side must be one of the most dramatic one could encounter in the neighborhood. The drama is best captured by the arc of the driveway, with its foundation forming a formidable wall, making the driveway above appear much larger and more important than it otherwise would. This view came as quite a surprise, as for years I have admired Mr. Hill’s house, but on its Highland Drive side.

Continuing my way up the Greenbelt to 10th Avenue, I was presented with an equally dramatic view of the backside of a building many of us are familiar with, St Mark’s Cathedral. Less ‘refined’ than its 10th Avenue entry, I find its backside much more satisfying. Lacking the brick veneer of the 10th Avenue entry, the back and sides of St Mark’s are unadorned concrete, the subtle textures of its board-forms adding a most pleasing texture. The surprise was not, however, as great as the differences between the front and back of the Hill house, as the sides of Saint Mark’s are easily visible from 10th.

Surprise often results when the difference between expectations and what one actually experiences. As a means to punctuate such a difference, I returned to the Hill house, but to that side which one typically encounters along Highland. The classic proportions of the building and its fine detail are little indication of what lurks just out of view. A clever recessed bay window and sundial are but a few of the building’s refinements and are in contrast to the expansive and monolithic wall now out of view. And I suppose it was just this kind of contrast – the contrast between what is known and what it discovered – that I was looking for when I embarked on this particular walk. Fortunately for us this kind of surprise is easily found within the diversity of our neighborhood, and one that will keep me searching and surprised for years to come.

Eleventh Avenue’s Eclectic Mix

There is a collection of four apartment/condominium buildings on 11th Avenue just south of Volunteer Park that merit special attention from architecture and landscape buffs on Capitol Hill.  While they all share fine materials, detailing, and wonderfully maintained landscapes, each has enough difference from one another – as well as from the typical Capitol Hill apartment building – that they simultaneously stand in distinction from our typical apartment flats and are yet simultaneously unified by their overall quality.

My favorites of the four are the two southernmost. With limited exceptions on the Hill, housing inspired more by English estate homes or collegiate-gothic is rare. Certainly such novelty lends to the charm, as does their excellent craft. This ‘gothic’ pair in some ways is the inverse of the northern two; in so much as they are undoubtedly modeled after much larger buildings. There is a bit of awkwardness in evidence in this transformation of a large precedent into a smaller footprint, with the projecting rooms and cornices better suited in scale to something much larger. Yet this juxtaposition of scale lends the pair a unique character and charm as well as interior spaces – in the case of the projecting rooms – that must be surprisingly light-filled for such a relatively compact building. Even the space between the buildings is rather compact, lending another distinction from their more pastoral precedent. Combing such crisply defined intimate spaces creates a rich pedestrian  experience of both shallow and deep space, paved and landscaped, that has few rivals on the Hill.

The third building of the quartet has its own peculiar scale, which is actually the opposite of the previous examples: here the building more resembles a single family home, but stretched to a more expansive size. An inflated Dutch colonial as it were. Instead of an entry and edge that recedes into the landscape as do the others, this building asserts its presence with pomp, its first floor raised above and accessed by a grand entry stair. It is as if the first two downplay their patrician heritage and the third elevates its prosaic roots.

The fourth building of the group presents us with a normative Capitol Hill edifice, but one that is molded to its site in an atypical manner. Instead of being the standard rectangular box, the building skews its northern façade to follow the bend of Prospect Avenue, with its main entry being accessed through a cozy courtyard not terribly different from the spaces created by the first pair of apartments. While hardly extraordinary, these two moves combined with a lush landscape helps to unite this fourth building with the other three: few such short stretches of apartments on the Hill simultaneously feel so united in purpose, but so different and unique in their individual expression.  

Remarkably similar to the Gothic pair, there is a bit of a loner on Broadway just north of Prospect that warrants a reference. I have always enjoyed the dignity of this building. Although rather diminutive in size, it is assertive to the street in the way of its brethren on 11th, and provides the same sort or projecting and light-filled rooms mentioned above as well as some of their historic references (note the castle-like crenellations on the roof parapet). With a little more breathing room on its southern side, one even gets the chance to see the transition from standard brick to clay tile blocks, a rarely used material in this country, but still common in Europe.