Ever been in a bank?

Isn't the Gates Foundation mostly for international concerns? I suppose they're more interested with looking impressive for foreign or Federal visitors than they are mingling with Seattleites.

The Gates Foundation building is primarily a bank, isn't it? I was walking around it the other day at night and the design and security around it reminded me of some of the biggest banks in Switzerland. The whole purpose of the foundation is to funnel massive amounts of money out to various global projects, seems to me all the other architectural design choices are a pretense for the giant bank vault below it.

Hah.

I actually love it.

It's a slap in the face to Urbists because he basically brought a Microsoft campus building...complete with greenspace...into a solid wall of structures that use every last square inch.

Maybe this is a sign of Seattle's inevitable surubanization, or a humorous insider joke (always the possibility where the Founding Families are concerned) that Microsoft could, would have been in downtown Seattle if the taxes weren't so dam high...

I'm okay with it except for the exterior (limestone?) cladding. The horizontal sheets of rock clash terribly with the windows and general horizontal massing of the structures. Plus the gold-ish color would be far more appropriate in a Southwestern US location and is completely incongruous with the local color palette. WTF were they thinking?

Ah, the local color palette.... At last count, it was 13 shades of beige. And then I cried, and wiped my tears on the bumpy spray stucco.

@ 6

I was thinking more along the general lines of blue, green, white, silver, brown, etc, which are colors that are pleasantly coherent with the natural and built environment. A nearby successful example of a similar-style building that is better integrated into the neighborhood is 2901 3rd Avenue, across the street from the Pacific Science Center on Denny.

well, just tear it down and start over. and have that critic lead the design presentations with the client. i'm sure he'd do a much better job than nbbj.

I've been waiting for this. Someone needs to attack this building. It is the worst, least urban building built inside a city in the past forty or fifty years.

Bailo's priorities are inside out as always, but he has inadvertently nailed the premise of this building: it is the suburban Microsoft campus brought into the city. It even LOOKS like a virus, with it's spinning hook shapes ready to latch on and infect the city around it.

What does this building say to the city around it? It says "stay away". There's no retail presence, no street presence at all. It's like a fractured Pentagon, only the war it is planning is on the city that surrounds it. It might as well have a moat.

Beige walls doesn't even begin to touch on what's wrong with this monstrosity. Charles is exactly right: it is an expression of passive-agressivity, the kind that sucks the soul out of the suburbs of Seattle, not Seattle itself. It has absolutely nothing to do with Seattle itself.

Pure evil. Look at those green spaces. Look at how it meets the street.

@3, there is no "bank vault". It's a parking garage. The Foundation doesn't have piles of cash on the premises. This is not a building one can walk to (or from). The people who work here won't be allowed to eat lunch in the neighborhood; they'll be in the safe interior cafeteria, eating what the Gateses tell them to eat. Like high school.

One of my best friends worked on that building. From the stories I heard...well, I don't want to get him or her in trouble.

@10: if your analysis is correct, it has met the client's goals perfectly. and that is an architect's job.

@12, which is why most architects should be shot.

For good or ill, you have to love the almost novelistic tale that is told on 5th Ave. Our two most famous billionairs have built monuments to their awesomeness within spitting distance of each other and both buildings couldn't better reflect their personalities.

BSOD failures on those strategically placed screens should spice things up occasionally.

@14, I never thought of it that way. Brilliant.

@10,

And also consider where they put it. There aren't many places in Seattle better suited to their mission of closing employees off from the surrounding neighborhood. That monstrosity is surrounded by parking lots, Seattle Center, and Aurora, and pedestrian access at Fifth and Mercer is shit. Ever tried to walk to Dexter from there?

@10: "Bailo's priorities are inside out as always"

Is Bailo SRoTU? That explains so much.

@17, and of course the city is trying to solve that problem, but first they allowed this monstrosity in.

@18, yup.

@14: wonderful analysis...that really does explain so much.

@13: i didn't know you were an architect.