• The mountain is in the distance, the museum is on the left in the foreground with all that dark glass, and the "plaza" is that triangle of concrete at the end of it.

Here's the problem at TAM: Predock designed the building so it faces Mount Rainier. One whole area of the top floor of the museum is a glass hallway with a gorgeous, genuflective view of the mountain—and this area never seems to hog space away from the generously proportioned, warm galleries.

But facing Mount Rainier means facing away from the center of downtown—means the building turns its back on downtown.

...The jurors were impressed with how the project relates to the city and the water, as well as the inclusion of sustainable elements such as the green roof which “feels more like a rooftop park.”

The image is by LMN.

What I wrote:

Despite the many dangers of Freeway Park, despite its eerie maziness, I still rate it as the most important and stimulating park in this city. No amount of crime will stop me from loving this strange and often dark place.

The image is from rutlo's photostream.

Lawrence Halprin, Freeway Park Viewing Base, 1976

Freeway Park is like a craggy mountain on its head; the summit is at the bottom. You climb down elaborate descending stairs to stand on a narrow plane with a bracing view. But this isn't a vista. You face an ugly metal screen. A thin slice of waterfall rushes in front of it, falling from the top of the park. Through the water and the metal, you can see the subject you came all this way to look at: cars flying by under an orangey electric light, inside the concrete tunnel of Interstate 5. It's as if the park were here first, and then the city sprung up around it, interrupted it, completed it.

This fellow's photographs of Freeway Park and Halprin's other works are terrific. Mr. Mudede loves Freeway park, too.

Sorry I forgot to tell you earlier.

Washington Hall—where W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, and Jimi Hendrix played—has been bought and is being renovated by Historic Seattle.

I slipped inside this afternoon and saw hallways of bare lath, leaky ceilings, piles of garbage, a squatter in a cramped room watching a soap opera, a black and soundproofed room that looked like a sex dungeon, and a desk full of computer-porn printouts.

Workers are busy inside, but didn't seem into having their photos taken.

More photos—of pigeon shit, the sex room, and the porn (NSFW/Not Safe for Life)—below the jump.

New sign:

Old sign:

New sign:

They let me up to the vertiginous heights where Joey and Anthony said they were running out of Camel Lights and did I have any. I didn't.

• Don't look down.

During the lunch break Jim talked about seeing the Beastie Boys at the Parmount back in "what was that, '87?" Then he recited most of the lyrics to "Paul Revere."

"Have any good memories of the sign?" I asked. "Kiss anybody pretty under there?"

"Naw my wife'd kill me if I said that," Jim said.

"Hey Jim, I heard you boned a girl under that sign!" one of the other workers joked. "Just tell your wife you were making shit up to sound cool in The Stranger!"

Jim just grinned and kept on reciting: "I did it like this/I did it like that/I did it with a wiffle-ball bat."

More photos after the jump. And the new sign goes up starting 9 am tomorrow morning.

• Ciar

... whether the Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle was ever going to replace its iconic, 80 year old sign with an exact replica that is 90% more energy efficient (1,932 LED bulbs that use .75 watts per bulb), LEED certified (lots of recycled aluminum), and made by the Sign Factory of Kirkland for $616,000—the answer is yes.

From Tuesday through Thursday of this week, construction workers will (very carefully) take down the fragile old sign and install the new one. There may be traffic delays. Full text of the press release, including all kinds of geeky specs, lives below.

And just in case you were wondering whether the floor plan of the Paramount Theater looks like some blocky design for an energy drink—the answer is also yes.

Some four dozen big buildings in the heart of Detroit are languishing, vacant, because demand for commercial and office space has dropped and money to demolish or renovate them has dried up.

These are among the most visible ghosts in a city of ghostly buildings — the harsh, physical evidence of a community that has lost 1 million people from its peak population of 1.8 million in the 1950s.

Some are in shocking condition: sidewalks cordoned off to protect pedestrians from falling chunks of facade; trees growing from roofs.

The city of Detroit can't afford to bury its dead people....

DETROIT (CNNMoney.com) — At 1300 E. Warren St., you can smell the plight of Detroit.

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. "Some people don't come forward even though they know the people are here," said the former Detroit cop. "They don't have the money."

Then, he built nothing.

The development fell apart. And central downtown Tacoma fell into even uglier disrepair than it had already been in. The space was, and is, a parking lot. (And this is reason #5,899 why Tacomans hate Seattle.)

I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the Luzon building was being demolished that minute. Despite protests and even an appeal to a judge for a last-minute stay of execution that ran into the early morning Saturday, the Luzon building ultimately was a victim of the market. Developers couldn't make it pencil out—just like they couldn't make it pencil out when all the structures the Luzon leaned on came down—and city government idiotically only saw a future in tearing down the past. This in a city where historic buildings—Union Station, the University of Washington Tacoma—have, more than any other single force, heroically revived what was once not a dying but a dead metropolis.

• Peter Haley/The News Tribune

• Peter Haley/The News Tribune

Fuck you, Tacoma city government. It's something I never could have said when I worked at The News Tribune (1999-2005), even when it needed saying. If you didn't learn this lesson in the '80s, then apparently you never will: If you make your historic buildings dependent on the market, then you will lose them. Seattle has a public authority that protects buildings. Tacoma has nothing like it. The city manager and council, in this case, blessed the authority of the developer, like the 1980s mayor before him, and voila! Rubble.

This makes me particularly sad because I love Tacoma. It is a complicated city with what is often a heartbreaking narrative, but it is never dull. I feel guilty for not having known this was going on. The Trib covered the story in detail but I'd checked out of Tacoma this summer, or I'd have read the words of always-awesome columnist Peter Callaghan, which are worth revisiting here and here. (The latter is written as a session between Tacoma and its psychoanalyst—an overworked character if ever there was one.) Here is the story on the day of the demolition; you can hear the pain and resignation in architectural historian Michael Sullivan's voice when the longtime Tacoma champion tells the reporter, "I thought we were just a lot more sophisticated on historic preservation stuff."

I screamed at last night's SIMPARCH opening. (No, no, not embarrassing at all.) I screamed because a woman crawled out the mouth of the humongous Godzilla lying at my feet. (She was unharmed. She was chipper, in fact, which I think made the shock worse.)

Godzilla is lying there, taking up the entire Bellevue gallery Open Satellite, because he can't even be bothered to attack cities anymore—they're doing the self-destructive work of making themselves bland and indistinct already, his sleepiness seems to imply. He's just lost interest.

Meanwhile, Godzilla himself—by two members of SIMPARCH (a collective named after "simple" and "architecture"), Steve Badgett and Matt Lynch—is a work of surprisingly interesting architecture.

From the outside he's just a big green eyeless bumpy creature made of shadecloth stapled onto a wood frame.

Eventually, though, as you walk around him, you find an opening in his belly. Once you get into his carpeted innards, all around you are webby tunnels that end in vanishing points (his tail, his mouth, his clawed legs).

The structure is an improvised web of wood slats sort of haphazardly pieced together, as if the artists actually built the thing by sight rather than premeditation—as in, "Here, put one here." "Yeah, let's add one there."

Big-budget works of sculptural architecture like, say, the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing, computer-model their seeming randomness into fastidious being. But this Godzilla's randomness comes from simply trying to build something that won't fall down, within a small budget, and on a deadline. A sort of joy is the result.

See for yourself through October 3. Also be sure to check out the installation from the outside; the gallery window looks in on his innards. More views on the jump.

These trains are coolly stylish. Too cool, perhaps, for some. A number of those who have ridden on the Javelins say that their interiors are too stark: seats do not line up with windows, lighting is antiseptic. There is no provision for catering. The standard-class interiors have been designed to resemble efficient inter-city jet airliner cabins, making maximum use of space and with no concessions to design conceits. This is no-frills railway travel.

This picture is by Nick Taylor.

Iran's industry minister has been found guilty of fraud, dealing a fresh blow to his close ally Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president.

Ali Akbar Mehrabian was convicted by an Iranian court over claims by a researcher that he had stolen his idea for an "earthquake saferoom'' - a design for a fortified room in homes in case of disaster, local media reported on Monday.

An appeals court upheld that the design belonged to researcher Farzan Salimi and convicted Mehrabian of fraud but did not prescribe any punishment, according to Iranian newspapers.

The conviction is the latest embarrassment to Ahmadinejad, who has already been pressed to drop his choice of vice-president, had his intelligence minister fired on Sunday and had his culture minister quit on him on the same day.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath.

Part of the design’s appeal is voyeuristic. The portholes evoke gigantic peepholes. Their enormous size, coupled with the small scale of the rooms, exposes the entire apartment to the city outside. Many of the midlevel units look directly onto an elevated freeway, so you are almost face to face with people in passing cars. (On my first visit there, a tenant told me that during rush hour, drivers stuck in traffic often point or wave at residents.)

But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

The current residents of this building want it to be no more. They want something new. They want a building that has a future and not one that had a future. But how is it possible that a building with the most perfect idea of the future ("the idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society") could become outdated and hated? Our current thinking about architecture does not surpass the thinking that went into the Capsule Tower. And yet it's a building that's rejected by the very people it was designed to accommodate. The people of a tomorrow that is now.

The pics are by pict_u_re.

[The German architect and urban planner] Thomas Sieverts had been brought to Seattle as part of Suddenly.org’s translation and publication of Sieverts book, Zwischenstadt, translated as “in-between city” and published as “Where We Live Now.”

The assumption of “Where We Live Now,” and one that seemed lost on Charles Mudede when he reviewed the book in The Stranger, is that the city as an organizing idea, as the vehicle of culture, as a center no longer functions. In fact, the city hardly reflects the reality, as they say, on the ground. One section of Sieverts’s book is titled, “The Distorting Myth of the City.” Stadler begins the annotated reader, “The French historian Fernand Braudel makes the astonishing claim that any city “has to dominate an empire, however, tiny, in order to exist at all,”and astonished, Stadler makes quick work that this concept comes with a number of assumptions that no longer hold.

To this day, when publications like Seattle Magazine talk about Seattle, what they really have in mind are neighborhoods like Fremont, which are white. Out of habit, out of laziness, it is standard for whites in the north (who usually speak for our city) to describe Seattle as a white city; but go to South King County (population 120,000), to Southcenter Mall (20 million visitors per year), or to Southeast Seattle (population 120,000), and this is not the case. These places are racially integrated—a social environment that year after year is becoming less and less exceptional in Seattle. (In 1960, Seattle was 92 percent white; now it is 67 percent, a figure that according to indicators will continue to fall as we go deeper into the 21st century.)

Southcenter Mall is exactly in this area that Sieverts calls zwischenstadt (the “in-between city”), and, like Sieverts, I think this kind of area is unappreciated and often misunderstood.

My point of view is this: I think of a center not as a real thing but as a necessary illusion—or, in other words, a form of cognitive mapping. In the way that we see other galaxies in the universe flying away from us, and therefore giving us the impression of being at the center of all things, when in fact any point in the universe would give you this impression—of being at the center of the universe and galaxies flying away from you—the center of the city has the appearance (not the reality) of being the center. The reality? Not one center but multiple centers; not one universe but Deutsch's multiverse.

One Pot also has a Sievert's event this evening at the opening of the Suddenly Exhibition in Pioneer Square. These are things you might like to do.

More photos here.