(NOTE: YESTERDAY AND TODAY, we’re running excerpts from “Tropisms,” a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)

BY THE 1960s, one highway was insufficient and a ring-road was proposed to save downtown.

The Monson Plan, 1963. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideal of a Radiant City, Seattle planned a ring-road and high rises to clear out open space in the downtown.

Four parking reservoirs, one at each corner of the ring (capacity, 13,000). Entire reconstruction of the waterfront, including the elimination of the Pike Place Market. A new government center. Leveling of Pioneer Square with slab towers to be built in the cleared open space. And more!

The battle of competing visions was carried out not only through bureaucracies and debate, but also through drawings. Most of the plans we’ve been looking at are just powerful drawings–political tools.

A professor of architecture at the UW, Victor Steinbrueck, published his own vision of Seattle, Seattle Cityscape (1961), just before Monson became a public plan. These competing visions could not have been more starkly realized:

SLIDE: MONSON PLAN SMITH TOWER BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

The Monson Plan.

SLIDE: STEINBRUECK SMITH TOWER STREET SCENE

Steinbrueck has taken us down to ground level–now we’re pedestrians, not planners; we live here, not lord over here.

Steinbrueck asserts so much with these drawings–with his style of densely overlapping lines he asserts that the urban fabric is so tightly, intricately woven that no one part of it can be removed without damaging the whole; he asserts this is a place of hidden, obscured lives, into which we may project/find our own fantasies and meanings.

Steinbrueck’s drawings were as powerful, even successful, a projection of the private imagination into civic realities as were the Monson drawings, or any of R.H. Thomson’s less delicate or graceful projections.

SLIDE: MONSON PLAN, OVERVIEW

The Monson plan was funded by the city in collaboration with the downtown business group, the Seattle Central Association. It was received enthusiastically by the Times, which helped argue for the $225 million in public money that was being asked to fill out the $575 million budget.

Within a few months, opposition news began appearing in the Times’s back pages.

Finally, the news (in Seattle, the equivalent of an obituary) of the decision to defer and “make a study.” (Headline: “Central Plan Foes Win Partial Victory”).

This process helped catalyze the ideology and infrastructure of preservation in Seattle: Allied Arts. Save the Market.

Also, drawing styles changed; so even the pro-Monson reports of the Urban Design Commission in the mid-’70s feature Steinbrueck-style populist street scenes.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, both consciousness and practice in the city were well prepared to resist proposals such as John Graham’s 1966 proposed renovation of Pioneer Square.

The meaningful give-and-take that determined the place and impact of these projects–themselves the product of many private visions colliding–was as much effected by forms such as drawing, public speaking, even party-going, as they were by government and city planners.

There are no clean dividing lines between “real” projects and the fantasies from which action springs. Victor Steinbrueck’s drawings are merely different in scale or degree from R.H. Thomson’s regrades–they are not different in kind.

Built projects can also be graceful, leaving a delicate trace, nimble, and mutable in the hands or minds of the present:

SLIDE: A.Y.P. AT NIGHT

Buildings from the Alaska-Yukon Exposition stayed with us (the architecture building on UW campus is the only structure still remaining, other than the Drumheller Fountain); the images have also persisted.

Even real buildings can function the way I think fictions and drawings do–flexible, intimate yet autonomous, available to each of us to be made or remade into meaning.

SLIDE: SEATTLE TOWER BUILDING IN FOG, WITH MT. RAINIER IN BACKGROUND

Notice how this most-beautiful, most flexible and graceful of the city’s buildings pays its respects to the humbling forms around it, the enormous ones on the horizon.

And, most astonishing of all, this vision is real, material, built here in this city, yet as it stands is as unreal and available as a novel or a dream of the city.

All our projections of the private imagination into the civic space should be so graceful.

TOMORROW: Yet another doomed cool place.

ELSEWHERE:

• No, skepticism about advertising and brand names isn’t new. Remember Wacky Packages?…
• Lars Ulrich from the band Metallica hates MP3 traders. Here’s their chance to prove their integrity: “Pay Lar$”!…