End Station
Last year, I edited an issue of the local architectural journal Arcade that was devoted to the future possibilities of the three old stations inside of the three big cities of our region—Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland. At that time, I supported the remodeling (or unmodeling) project that’s still, ever so slowly, in progress. For those who don’t know about it, this is more or less the story: forty or so years ago, in an effort to make the old station look modern, architects covered up its Italianate decorations and moldings. Ten or so years ago, with the rebirth of the station (primarily due to increased rail traffic between Seattle and Portland), a project to undo what the modernists had done to the station’s interiors was started. Though I favor modernist architecture to the revivalist architecture that began in the 19th century and finally died in the 1920s, covering up the problem at King Street Station was a bad idea—the architectural equivalent of sweeping a mess under a rug. It’s much better for a building to be what is rather than what it is not.
This weekend, an article about the new train station in Berlin (which is now the biggest station in Europe) changed my position on King Street Station. We should stop re/unmodeling it, tear the whole thing down, and build a station that’s as bold as the one in Berlin:
Seattle must stop fussing over old buildings; let them go, let them die, and focus on the new, the future ahead. Leave Portland and Tacoma to do all the preservation and historic stuff.
Uncovering the past, as the contractors are presently doing in KSS, is ultimately meaningless because Seattle doesn’t have a past. We only own the future—even if the idea of a future is an illusion (more on this at another time).
We'll never become a "world class" city unless we tear down the whole damn thing!
And build a monorail!