ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.
And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it's led to a building boom.
Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.
Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.
In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities' former character. Houston's glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.
Seattle's current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms--precisely because it marks such a break from the city's heritage. And I don't just mean behaviorally.
It's changing the face of the city. But it's not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.
Boomtown Seattle's new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers' and lawyers' town trying desperately to become "world class" and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.
The Kingdome's final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome's different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).
While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes--Nintendo's Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.
Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen's refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.
Allen's also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled "The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts"), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle's shadow.
Allen's erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle's current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW's main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).
And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local "old money" (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.
Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.
On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy--values you'd ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.
The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.
The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most "tastefully" outlandish.
UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto's over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on "CBC" from iCraveTV's site).
MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.
ELSEWHERE:
- Writing new captions to old cartoon illustrations is a time-honored shtick, done for years in the pages of Punch. Here's a site completely devoted to it: Daze of Our Lives....
- Someone who believes "a true Utopia is possible," and has uploaded three volumes of texts to support his notion....
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:
ARCHIVES:
- 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
- Reviews of literature & art, monfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
- Longer articles and essays
- The origin and future of MISCmedia
