This is nothing more than a very crude sketch of an answer to something that can only be obvious to a person whose brain faithfully reproduces the waves of information captured by their eyes. What we see in Seattle are a lot of new town houses, homes, and apartment buildings that are almost universally uninteresting. It seems that anything we build on the human scale so beloved by the neo-Jacobsian Danish architect Jan Gehl is designed with as little imagination and as few risks as possible.

Indeed, one architect recently pointed out to me that the sudden appearance of color on a number of five-story (human-scale) apartment buildings that are under construction (such as the eruptions of yellow on the street-facing sides of Anthem on 12th) are an architect's attempt to break as best as he/she can from the commonsense conservatism of his/her clients. (I blame much of the blandness we see not so much on architects but on developers and the public—mediocre housing is always a good sign of a democracy that has failed politically but is very free to express itself in the market.)

But leave the mundane region of the human scale and enter that of the race of people who live at the top of the giant beanstalks and we find architecture that's much more interesting and innovative. In short, Seattle's best buildings are often its towers. And the current construction boom seems to be reinforcing this fact that no eye can miss. This is not to say that our towers are so special or wonderful, but that looking up tends to be more rewarding in this town than looking straight ahead. But why is it that the more expensive (meaning, the taller) a building is, the more creative it is, the more flair is in its design? I think the answer is found in Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

In trying to explain why a large fortune has a higher rate of return than a smaller one, the most famous economist of our age says that large investment portfolios have the human resources to invest in exotic markets where interest rates and profits tend to be much higher than what is ordinarily found in established markets. The barrier to entry for an exotic market is only overcome, however, by experts in these markets. Without such a team, you must keep your money in safe-but-low-yielding blue-chip stocks.

My guess is that something similar is at work with the architecture of this city. At a certain level of investment, it pays to take risks, and developers who can shoulder a big investment can better weather these risks in design. Look around you and you will see that when a building reaches a certain height, architects are free to unbuckle and leave their seats.