I've got way too much going on this weekend to be able to cover it all easily in one post when I get back to work on Tuesday after the holiday weekend, so I'm going to get this one out of the way now: late this morning, Alexia and I went on a Seattle Architecture Foundation volunteer-guided architecture tour called "
Through the Looking Glass," focusing on glass in architecture. It started at the Amazon Spheres at 6th and Lenora, and worked its way down to Rainier Square, the public plaza between the
901 Fifth Avenue and Fourth & Madison buildings, and eventually found its way down to Colman Dock on the waterfront.
I had taken a couple of the guided tours before, but had not done so since the first two I took, the very first of
all my architecture tours, back in 2007. I then bought
a book of self-guided architecture tours, and created photo albums after taking myself on all nine of them, all in 2008.
—Oh, wait! Apparently I was mistaken: I did take
one more guided tour with the Seattle Architecture Foundation,
in 2009, about the origins of Seattle's gay community in Pioneer Square. I had forgotten about that, and am only just realizing the
Seattle Queer History Tour I took last year, hosted by a different organization that is not focused on architecture, was largely an updated version of that.
Anyway, the point is: I last did an architecture tour specifically related to the Seattle Architecture Foundation in September 2009, 14 years ago.
Alexia had done a couple of SAF tours with another friend a few years before the pandemic, and was happily interested in going on this one with me—and she covered the tickets, as a thank-you for taking care of her cat, Cassie while she's been out of town (she did the same with our Theo Chocolates Factory Tour a couple of weekends ago). The tour today was two hours long, and we met out in the hallway outside our condos at 9:20, to walk down to 6th and Lenora to meet up by the start time of 10 a.m.
Shobhit had theorized that, meeting outside the Amazon Spheres, maybe the tour would include going inside them—I rather doubted that. They still only open the Spheres for public visits
two Saturdays a month and while we waited to start our tour at around 10:00, a quite long line was waiting to get in. There would not be any easy way to incorporate getting the 20 or so of us in there as well, just as one stop on a walking tour around downtown.
I do love the Amazon Spheres, which I have now actually been to
four times, all of them between 2018 and 2019. But, for me, there was a far more exciting discovery on today's tour: the now-open public terrace space at Rainier Square, between what are now three buildings on that single block:
Rainier Tower (1977, 514 ft, 31 floors, the one building still on the block from before recent construction);
Rainier Square Tower (2020, 847 ft, 58 floors, now the second-tallest building in Seattle); and
400 University (2021, 10 floors).
Back before all this new construction, the public terrace a level above the street that wrapped around the tapered base of Rainier Tower was even then something I considered a hidden gem. They used to do "Movies On the Pedestal" and would project outdoor movies on that tapered base; I
saw Best In Show there once in 2007. Once the whole block was bogged down with construction,
as far back as 2018 (that shot was taken in February, so demolition would have to have begun in 2017), most of the lobby of Rainier Tower, all of the atrium that used to exist beneath it, and that end of the tunnel that once connected to the atrium became inaccessible. Although Rainier Square Tower opened in 2020, and the Downtown PCC store at its base opened in early 2022, a lot of that block remained inaccessible—especially with the third, much shorter (10-story) 400 University office building not getting finished until 2021.
I have no idea when the newly designed
public terrace space opened, but it would have to have been recent, and I only learned about it today on this tour. I have not yet taken many photos of the terrace space itself, kind of stupidly, because I focused my photos on the buildings surrounding it, as the tour guide told us all sorts of architectural facts about them all. After the tour was done, Alexia and I returned to Rainier Square, to get a hot chocolate and biscotti at the Fonté coffee shop on the second level of Rainier Square Tower—in a space that was just totally empty the last time I went up there to look—and we went and sat on shockingly nice and comfortable, padded furniture out there.
This is the thing about that public space, which technically is indeed public: finding it is tricky, which I'm sure was by design—so only enterprising people going out of their way to find it will do so, and that cuts down on the potential for homeless people camping out, out there. I was actually struck today by the large effects of public design, as the same was the case in a public terrace between 901 Fifth Avenue (formerly the Bank of California Building) and the Fifth and Madison Building. I have no doubt walked past that many times, but the way it's designed does not make it clear how easily you can just walk back there from 5th Avenue, and walk back to
another very cool terrace with a 360° view of downtown around it.
Our tour guide did contextualize a lot of the tour regarding glass, and some new interesting things were indeed learned about that—such as protective layers of plastic over downtown shop windows, very akin to the plastic covering you put on an iPhone screen—but my photos tended to focus more on the buildings and public spaces we encountered. The last point of interest did have to do with glass, and it was our tour guide's favorite, and the reason we went down to the pedestrian walkway over Alaskan Way to Colman Dock where the Washington State Ferries are: I got a photo of the long line of glass blocks embedded in the sidewalk along the front of the new Colman Dock ferry terminal, which I learned today are part of a cantilevered sidewalk about our new waterfront seawall. The glass blocks are there to allow light to get to the water below, for the benefit of juvenile salmon, so they can better see to eat and thus more successfully migrate to the rivers they're headed to. How cool is that?
Alexia had not yet seen the new Colman Dock, so we first went to walk around that a bit, and then we headed back up the hill. We tried to get to the public, 7th-story rooftop garden at the Fourth and Madison Building, which our tour guide told us about, but even though we managed to get into the building's lobby, too many doors were closed for us to make it to the garden. I'll have to try again on a weekday. From there we returned to Rainier Square, where we had the aforementioned hot chocolate and biscotti. We walked home after that, Alexia a bit sore because of something going on with her hip, but she insisted she was okay to walk all the way back and that continuing to move was good for it.
When I got back home, Shobhit was still reading the fantasy novel I had rediscovered on our bookshelf earlier this week, and he started reading last night, and which I could not for the life of me remember where I got it from. It's called
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. I told Alexia about it, and she reminded me that she had recommended it and loaned it to me. Ha! Well, Shobhit finished it in less than 24 hours, set it down while I was still processing today's photos on Flickr, and said, "You should read it."
I spent a good amount of time just on the many tags I put on the photos, which made for
a 66-shot photo album overall for today's architecture tour. I'd love to caption them all, but who knows whether I'll manage that.
I guess I'll also mention that, while Shobhit was at a work shift last night, I went over to Alexia's next door to watch our next Harrison Ford movie,
Clear and Present Danger. I found it to get better as it went along. We both enjoyed it, although few movies can match the greatness of what he'd been in before this,
The Fugitive.
Now Shobhit has dinner ready though and is eager for me to join him so I guess I'll post this and get on with my day.
[posted 5:40 pm]
