Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.

…of a time recently passed, whose legacy will linger with us for decades to come. They’re the Cheap Shit Condos (some of which actually are, or were, quite expensive).

The historic Central District meeting hall, known in recent decades as the original home of On the Boards’ performance-art events, now belongs to Historic Seattle. A big restoration/renovation will begin shortly.

…may be on pause, but that’s not stopping landowners from greasing the legal wheels in hopes of future development projects. Just last week, the City said owners of the former Bon Marche livery stables on Western could go ahead and tear down the 101-year-old clapboard structure, should they ever choose to do so.

Besides being a relic of the horse-drawn-delivery days, and one of the last buildings its age remaining in greater downtown, it’s also one of Belltown’s last buildings containing real artist spaces. (Note: On this Web site, architectural offices are not considered to be “artist spaces.”) It was in that building that I spent much of the 1994-95 winter and spring in Art Chantry’s former graphic design studio, assembling my book Loser.

We lose our NBA team, our biggest bank, our oldest newspaper, and now the biggest and greatest remnant of Seattle’s “working waterfront” era, the Alaskan Way Viaduct. At a Tuesday signing ceremony, city and state officials finalized the deal to build a “deep bore” tunnel to replace the elevated highway, and to redevelop the Viaduct land for more lucrative, corporate-friendly uses.

I’ve been involved in a heated Facebook discussion/argument over the project’s merits or lack thereof. I could reiterate the many various points of view presented in this discussion (why wasn’t this done decades ago; why isn’t there more transit in it; why etc.).

Invariably, two semi-inter-related arguments arise:

• San Francisco got rid of its elevated highway, therefore Seattle MUST do likewise; and
• This town totally, forever, SUCKS if it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do.

My responses:

• No, Seattle DOES NOT have to do everything exactly the way they did them in Egoville USA. This place is its own place, with its own needs. Get used to it.
• The infamous “Seattle process” is not about achieving consensus, I’ve concluded. It’s about delaying consensus (or the imposition of political will) for as long as possible, so all parties can fully vent their emotional feelings of righteous superiority. (“This town totally forever SUCKS, man, because it won’t do everything the way I think it should do them.”)
• The Viaduct is a relic of the era of our maritime-industrial heritage, prior to the developers’ dream of turning the waterfront into a “harbourpointe.” That’s part of what I love about it.
• However, that day’s gone and it’s not coming back. Cargo’s now in containers. That action’s on and around Harbor Island and Interbay.
• If the central waterfront and environs must be remade, let’s remake them in a friendly, funky way, not in a pompous Olympic Sculpture Park way. Bring on the tacky tourist stands, the hot dog vendors, the skateboard ramps, the buskers, the “fine art galleries” selling kitschy oil paintings of whales and herons. The last thing Seattle needs is another impracticable monument to the declaration of world-class-osity.
• I still like the Viaduct. I always will. Even when it’s gone.

…“Architecture and Resistance,” but Leebus Woods offers advice suited to all. Examples:

Resist whatever seems inevitable.Resist people who seem invincible.

Resist the embrace of those who have lost.

Resist the flattery of those who have won.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

Resist getting big jobs.

Resist the suggestion that you can only read Derrida in French.

Resist taking the path of least resistance.

Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.

(via Chuck Mathias):

So the big-wigs are getting the gazillion-dollar tunnel nobody else wants (Guys! I don’t care how temporarily cheap the depression’s made gas–cars are OVER! If you had the foresight of the average
rat sniffing a trap, you’d use the few dollars left before hyperinflation sets in to renovate the state’s railroads, including the TRACKS THAT ARE ALREADY UNDER THE VIADUCT!) Just another notch to add to their shootin’ arns, I guess, next to the monorail lots of other people wanted but didn’t get, and the baseball stadium lots of other people didn’t want, but got stuck with anyway. There are probably other examples, but I’m a Tacoman and not well-informed (sorry for the redundancy).I guess the question is: Are liberal oligarchs supposed to be better than the other kind?

Your site’s a treasure, by the way–about the only blog of a strictly local nature I never miss.

Chuck Mathias

But I’ve a less hectic day-work schedule this week, so let’s try to catch up on the recent news:

• Microsoft’s new on-campus mall includes a miniature, officially licensed “Pike Place Market” area. Like all of the MS “Commons,” it’s open only to MS employees and guests. This is wrong on more levels than I want to enumerate here, but I’ll settle for just a few concerns: Does it include the Athenian Inn? Farmer-run produce stalls? The magic shop?
• 
  Can you dig it?: It’s official. The Alaskan Way Viaduct will be replaced by a tubular hole in the ground beneath First Avenue, a hole which won’t have exits to downtown or Belltown. Bah.
• 
  Otherwise, our Democratic-controlled Legislature behaved very GOP-esque. It passed an all-cuts budget, decimated social services, and quietly shut down any talk about making our state tax system less regressive.
• 
  Sand clogs the pipes at the Magnolia sewer plant, due to all the sand put on city roads last December. Hey, let’s make a new artificial beach!
• 
  GM to dump thousands of jobs, hundreds of dealers, and the whole of Pontiac. (Oh yeah, Saturn and Hummer are gong away too; but my urban-hipster conditioning prevents me from mourning Hummer, and I’m too old to have any teenage memories of cruising the strip-mall roads in a Saturn.)
• 
  Sounders FC’s off to a smashing start; while the Mariners approach their ’01 glory days. Nice.

I’m on a marathon temp job this week and next. Until the 24th of this month, I’m basically doing little but working, commuting, sleeping, and perhaps eating. Expect few if any posts during this time.

Instead, consider a peek at writer-composer Igor Keller’s new blog, Hideous Belltown. Keller claims to have just recently noticed that a lot of Seattle’s artificially flat neighborhood “is downright hideously ugly.”

Well, it always was such, ever since Denny Hill was removed early last century and the resulting lowland became downtown’s low-rent district. It became a place of printing plants, car lots, union halls, social service agencies, warehouses, storefront taverns, and a few stoic lo-rise apartments and hotels.

Belltown was the unassuming generic cityscape in between the Space Needle and the downtown towers. It was what the Monorail helped you bypass between downtown shopping and Seattle Center entertainment. It was a relative nothing, in the middle of everything.

Which is precisely what made Belltown so attractive to artists and musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It was a place of (relatively) cheap rents, funky loft spaces, dive bars, and endless possibilities.

Of course, real estate developers also saw the possibilities.

After a few starts and stops, successive mayoral administrations succeeded in pushing Belltown as a hi-rise residential mecca.

And, either in spite or because of the gentle nudges of city zoning policies, the neighborhood’s big new buildings were generally just as homely as the small old buildings they replaced.

Which, of course, is part of the area’s enduring charm. Seriously.

Yr. humble scribe attended two private events in Belltown on Tuesday.

In the morning, the Escala condo project (Seattle’s last still-under-construction residential highrise) held a “topping off” ceremony on its roof, 31 floors above Fourth Avenue. A city official was there to praise the project as a key component in Mayor Nickels’s “center city strategy.” (Since when did we start calling our downtown “center city” anyway? Sounds like Norm Rice’s failed attempt to rebrand the waterfront as a “harborfront.”)

The ceremony was followed by a champagne toast down in the project’s sales office nearby. Two scale models of the finished building showed it as a shining beacon of quality living. A chart on one wall listed one third of the project’s 270-some units as sold. Another third are currently available. The rest are on hold, withdrawn from the market pending an upturn in conditions.

The second big event came that evening at the Crocodile. It was an invite-only bash honoring the 50th birthday of Kim Warnick, the legendary Fastbacks/Visqueen singer-bassist. The joint was packed with folks who’ve loved Warnick and her work. An all-star lineup of Seattle musicians paid tribute to her on stage.

Here’s the climactic moment of the evening, with Warnick joining in with her ol’ band members Kurt Bloch, Lulu Gargiulo, and Mike Musburger.

And here are more musical moments from the evening.

The contrast between that scene and the Escala fete reminded me of what Jonathan Raban said about NYC as a city of “street people” and “sky people.”

In his definition, “street people” weren’t just those who lived ON the streets but also those who walk and converse and meet friends on the sidewalks, who live in the street-level milieu of bars and shops and cafes.

The “sky people” of NY are those for whom, as Fran Lebowitz described it, “outside” is what’s in between the building you’re in and the building you’re going to. Sky people live in the rarified air of high rises, have household staffs to shop for them, and socialize at private clubs and exclusive bistros. The Escala will have a private club, the first new one in town in 20 years (I believe since the Columbia Tower Club).

Times have been tough for street-level citizens for several years.

Now, they’re becoming tough for sky people as well.

The thing is, we who live close to the ground know how to survive. And to have a helluva good time while doing so.

…if you have a perversely cynical definition of “fun.” As more and more homeowners face foreclosure, condo and townhome homeowner associations could go bust. The result could be a “death spiral” of collapsing home values.

French photographer Eric Tabuchi offers haunting, lonesome images of “Twenty-Six Abandoned Gasoline Stations.”

ICELANDIC WRITER Iris Erlingsdottir, meanwhile, wishes to remind you that merely having a female leader won’t, by itself, save her speculator-trashed country: “Estrogen Will Not Cure Greed and Stupidity.”

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS wants you to “Save the Words.” Simply mouse over the obscure word of your choice (the words will shout out “pick me” and “no, me”), learn its definition, and promise to use it in daily speech.

…at ungodly predawn hours this past month, schleppin’ to a suburban temp job. Writing hasn’t been among my biggest compulsions upon arriving home. Sorry.

There are still things worth mentioning, to be sure:

• 
  ANDY’S DINER IS SAVED! Well, at least the historic building on Fourth Avenue South, assembled from vintage railroad cars. It now houses a Chinese restaurant, bearing the appropriate title of Orient Express.
• 
  OUR PAL DAVID NEIWERT has done his own Sarah Palin research, direct from Alaska. It confirms just about the worst you’ve heard about her.
• 
  I’VE BEEN SILENT about other election stuff, but someone else has handily provided a Sensible Guide to Voting in Washington.
• 
  A FOOD DELIVERY TRUCK tipped over on a Tacoma highway, spilling 45,000 pounds of chocolate, ice cream, deli meats, and hot dogs. Mmm, the four great tastes that taste great together.

…of Washington Mutual Bank’s sale to JPMorgan Chase, another local end-of-an-era moment has received less attention. It’s the closure of the Rite Aid Pharmacy at Fourth and Pike in downtown Seattle, on the ground floor of the Joshua Green Building.

The store first opened in 1947 as the original location of Pay ‘n Save Drugs, founded by local businessman/philanthropist Monte Bean. Pay ‘n Save eventually grew to some 150 stores in five states; while the Bean family’s “Family of Stores” grew to encompass Ernst Hardware, Lamonts Apparel, Schuck’s Auto Supply and more.

Pay ‘n Save Corp. was taken over by New York investors in 1984. Nine years and two buyouts later, the remaining Pay ‘n Save locations became Payless Drug branches. Five years after that, Rite Aid acquired them.

Through all these changes, and while downtown’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the Fourth and Pike store survived and thrived.

This summer, the Green Building’s owners announced a massive remodeling. The changes included the displacement of its other street-level tenant, Carroll’s Jewelers.

Rite Aid management still hoped to get a lease renewal. The store received its requisite stock of Halloween candy and costumes.

But the building’s owners decided in mid-September to divide the space into several smaller storefronts. Rite Aid’s pharmacy counter immediately closed Sept. 16; prescriptions were transferred to its Belltown store. The store’s other merchandise is being liquidated through October or until it’s all gone.

…I documented local sign structures that no longer bore any messages. Now, it seems there’s a whole Signifying Nothing city. It seems the city leaders of Sao Paolo, tired of their burg being ignored by the world in favor of the smaller but prettier Rio, took the bold step of banning billboards and most other outdoor advertising signs. They called it a move against visual pollution.

Of course, a city without advertising is still the same city, just a little less dressed. In this case, it’s a huge city with some stunning skyscrapers and civic monuments, but also a lot of non-cosmetic civic problems, many arising from an exploding population and poor urban planning.