Good architecture is all fine and good, but there are core functions of local government, and there are nice to have things.

I think our society needs to nuture, support and fund the arts, but i'm againsts the masses having to pay loads and loads of $ for a new building just to say we have a "better, prettier" building.

Also, you're just plain wrong here. Aesthetics has its place when putting up new, needed buildings. The question that needs to drive policy is, do we need a new building, and can we afford a new building. Then and only then is aesthetics a matter for leaders to consider. Ferguson's right, Sim's wrong. He may be right about the building, although I'm neutral (it looks like a classic government building to me), but he's wrong to use aesthetics as an argument.

Ron Sims can have a new building if he imposes an income tax on people owning more than $1 million in property or income.

Otherwise, tell him to stop whining and get busy with more bus service for King County instead.

come off it chaz, you're clearly making logical leaps and filling in blanks that exist in your own mind.

this is new?

Cities everywhere are losing so much mid-century-to-70's architecture, just when it's more in fashion than ever, and replacing by 10 years-out-of-fashion, won't-be-back-in-fashion-for-another-30 shit hulks.

Maybe I'm just bitter for what they did to my 16th and Mission BART station last year. It's a crime.

i have a love hate relationship with the crap built in the 1950s/1960s. living in california most my life, and in a suburb to boot, most the architecture was from that era, so there is an emotional attachment to it. on the other hand, it's not that good to look at and gives this sense of "this was the future and the future died!"

Consume, tear down, waste and consume some more.

Our downtown library is one of the world's most important buildings. It feel like an noisy airport inside because it's a space for ideas to take flight. Only ignorant rural rubes don't understand it.

We urban dwellers have deeper understanding than those who live in the sticks.

Especially when a designer's idea of aesthetically pleasing is either so pedestrian, or so off the wall that it pleases no one.

The 16th stop used to be very similar to the 24th street stop, replete with those trademarked transitioned bricks rounding out most of the right angles, which not only served as a hit-and-run joy for skateboarders, but made urinating on extremely difficult as the pee would run back toward the shoes of the offender thanks to the banked surfaces.

All that lovely modern brick was torn out and replaced with some terrible late-80's looking gray and marble colored designs, that not only offends the eyes, but the nose and shoes as all the nice new hiding spots allow the whome south side to fill up with a good 1/4" of urine. Nice going!

Seattle, leave it alone. The old library did suck, but because it lacked all character and no one cared, not because some people didn't like it. Sorry, but I think the new opera house is a shit-ugly ode to the 90's, it looks like a goddamn Starbucks on the outside (the inside ain't bad) - and I may be alone in that opinion, but it makes me think ya'll got lucky with your library.

I don't know the realities of the County's capital budget, how you measure the impacts on workers, or what a newer, more inspiring design might cost. So, maybe now is not the right time, but that building is ugly, inside and out. It must be oppressive to most everyone who works in there, and is certainly oppressive to most people who walk by. Aesthetics should certainly be a factor in deciding when to replace the building and what to replace it with.

If aesthetics don't matter, let's just do what Eastern Bloc governments and US public housing agencies did in the post-war years - build all public buildings with the same, cinder-block, high-rise design.

it matters but it isnt the first thing that matters.

In short, Charles, you and Sims are off your rockers. And you know as well as anyone else that the sort of building Sims will want to replace it with will be Yet Another Gimmicky Travesty of Broad Curved Glass And Oblique Angles. Like City Hall... of about a half dozen cities in the metro area.

If I could definitively decide that the KCAB was brutalist (it would possibly seem to qualify), it would be a champion of that style's legacy by being such a good reflection of purpose in form.

Oh deard lord. DO get out more. You're looking to a building - a GOVERNMENT building - for inspiration? And you're actually oppressed by buildings as well? Wow, all those Iraqi war orphans ain't got NOTHIN' on YOU, you poor li'l fella!

Stupid SLOG entry, stupid Sims, stupid hippy-dippy pointless crap that gives Seattle a bad name. We're all doomed with "oppressed" dipshits like you running around Seattle.

If i want to be inspired I want crazy roman inspired architecture. classic, timeless, and inspiring to me.