Author Archives: John Feit

About John Feit

John Feit is a Capitol Hill architect and the founder of 3+. He blogs frequently on design and urbanism, with a focus on how they relate to and affect the Capitol Hill community. He can be reached at [email protected]

CHS Schemata | Bellevue, Bellevue, and Bellevue — Part 1

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(Images: John Feit)

Buildings are relatively simple to write about.

They are objects within the landscape and as such are easy to quantitatively define easing the path to a qualitative assessment. Landscapes, on the other hand, can be more challenging as they are often composed of a seemingly infinite number of parts. The relative position between landscape and viewer can present challenges as well. Buildings typically has a front, back, and sides. The main facade, often where the entry is, usually grabs the most attention and is the view seen in glossy magazines. Landscape lacks such frontal qualities. What tree, hill, river, or plaza has a defined front (or back, for that matter)? While there are certainly advantageous views that elicit feelings of lesser or greater satisfaction, landscape’s ensemble of vegetation, geography, geology, buildings, and other characteristics make it more challenging to succinctly describe; yet, it is these very qualities that also make it more satisfying and emotionally evocative than most buildings.

It is these multifaceted and often elusive qualities that keep me writing about what I enjoy most about Capitol Hill, the amazing variety of landscapes both architectural and otherwise. Landscape is all encompassing, yet hard to distill to key points that are succinctly shared.

With landscapes as diverse as Pike/Pine and Volunteer Park, one would have to put conditions on what constitutes one’s favorite Capitol Hill landscape, such as: which is my favorite commercial street, distant view, or verdant park? Despite this inexorable taxonomical quandary, Bellevue, Bellevue, and Bellevue, on the northwest corner of the Hill, certainly presents opportunities to engage landscapes that are among the Hill’s finest.

Its charms are many — too many for just one post — so I start with with that quality which I think is the most noteworthy: the combination of both close-in and distant vistas as well as the variety of both natural and created landscapes that are all available for enjoyment within a two or three block area. Continue reading →

CHS Schemata | The Capitol Hill architectural assembly of Seattle Prep

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAFor a number of reasons, campuses merit special attention from the fan of architecture, including how — in a concise venue — differing design approaches can be observed. The earliest academic campuses include those of the medieval universities in northern Italy and in England, with Cambridge and Oxford setting the strongest precedents for what has become known as collegiate Gothic. Those of Italian influence (Padua and Bologna for instance) also served as models, but in a Renaissance flavor. These divergent sources from the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean created a menu of architectural styles for institutions that followed; one pick one’s campus style, as it were, to be either pointy (Gothic) or round (Renaissance). A splendid example of the former is found just to the north of Capitol Hill on the University of Washington campus, whose historic core abounds with buildings of the collegiate Gothic flavor.

Like the other primary and secondary school campuses I have written about, Seattle Prep brings an important assembly of building and landscape to Capitol Hill. The school is unique among the three mentioned as it most closely resembles the traditional college campus. It is not associated with one splendid building as is Holy Names nor did it evolve in an organic and engaging manner as did Bertschi School. Seattle Prep is a planned campus of many buildings purposely built over time. Yet, within its planning, each building has it own unique identity and represents the prevailing tastes of its time, making the campus a great microcosm of larger architectural and academic trends. Continue reading →

CHS Schemata | Capitol Hill’s grand dome

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(Images: John Feit)

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For more than 2000 years, the dome has held a privileged position in Western architecture. As the three dimensional expression of the circle, whose geometrical perfection is venerated by cultures world-wide, the dome symbolizes importance more than any other single architectural feature. One of the oldest domes — and perhaps the most famous — is the Pantheon in Rome, a temple built during the reign of Caesar Augustus (63 B.C. – 14 A.D.) in honor of twelve of Rome’s most important deities. Since then, the geometrically powerful form has lent its geometrical purity to convey importance to a variety of institutions, be they governmental (the Washington State Capitol, Olympia), academic (the Rotunda, the University of Virginia), or ecclesiastical (Saint Peter’s, Rome). And, why not? You see a dome on a building, and you know it means business.

One institution that was an early adopter of the dome was the nascent Catholic Church; and the dome, as it turned out, was conveniently at hand. Soon after Rome’s decline, the Church adopted the Pantheon as a Christian place of worship, and it became an important early church. The Pantheon (and the cachet of its dome) enabled the Church to associate itself with ancient Rome, Europe’s grandest civilization and greatest engineer-architects. In the following millennia, the dome has found home atop many Catholic institutions in dozens of countries, including Capitol Hill’s own Holy Names Academy, a Catholic girl’s high school and one of our neighborhood’s most splendid buildings. And while its dome may be the first architectural element to catch one’s eye, Holy Names’ classically inspired delights continue throughout its original building. Continue reading →

CHS Schemata | Capitol Hill’s urban alleys

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Capitol Hill is fortunate to have an extensive system of alleys. They provide a home for utilities, trash and recycling, garage entries, as well as alternative routes through which to get from here to there. Having previously written on Capitol Hill’s eastern, single-family-home dominated alleys, I decided to explore those on the Hill’s denser commercial and apartment building inhabited landscapes.

Although I was surprised — and somewhat disappointed — that the number of alleys were fewer than I had found on the Hill’s Eastern flanks, the west side’s more urban character and frequency of use — combined with a relative dearth of greenery and crisper, built boundaries — captivated me for the better part of a mid-winter morning and early afternoon. Another strikingly different character of these alleys from those to the east were their unobstructed and distant vistas, making them even more inviting than their eastern siblings.

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CHS Schemata | Group Health Capitol Hill’s hidden charms (and crazy slide)

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAHospitals typically are not architecturally endearing structures. A hospital campus can even less so. Designed by the same type of large, corporate architecture firms that reflect the organization of the hospitals themselves, this pair of leviathans typically has more pressing matters than fitting neatly into their surroundings. The demands of programmatic efficiencies and healthful interior environments makes the focus of such institutions decidedly inward, their mission dictating priorities that better serve their patients and staff, oftentimes at the expense of enhancing their surrounding exterior environment. This is not the case on Capitol Hill where our own Group Health Cooperative has (at least part of) its campus providing a genuine attempt to be a good neighbor.

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CHS Schemata | Seattle Asian Art Museum is Art Deco at the summit of Capitol Hill

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5-Courtyard-small-687x486The Seattle Asian Art Museum in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park is a splendid building housing a magnificent collection of ancient and contemporary art. Designed by the Seattle firm Bebb and Gould (designers of many noteworthy structures in Seattle, including many prominent homes on Capitol Hill) and built in 1933, it originally housed the entire collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

(Images: John Feit/Schemata Workshop with permission to CHS)

(Images: John Feit/Schemata Workshop with permission to CHS)

Set within Volunteer Park, SAAM shares its museum-in-the-park setting with other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose home is in New York City’s Central Park. As private collections predated by centuries those offered for public view, the museum-in-the-park typology finds precedent in that of the manor house in the landscape of either a noble’s estate in Europe or that of the landed elite of the East coast of the United States. Both the museum and the public garden are places of leisure, and their pairing is sensible, for sure, and allows for a full day’s outing both in and out-or-doors. In this tradition, SAAM and Volunteer Park present no less compelling a pairing than their historic or big city predecessors.

Art Deco (approximately the style in which SAAM was designed), to my mind, has always had a somewhat precarious and undervalued place within the history of modernist design. It never garnered the serious attention paid to many other 20th century movements, because it was seen, perhaps, as only a pleasant if not too serious ‘scenic’ detour along the thoroughfare of the more rigorous, international style modernism that eclipsed it. Architects, especially, like to see modernism as the built manifestation of industrialization and of the Enlightenment’s goal of human progress. Modernism’s emphasis on functionality, abstraction, and a machine aesthetic are well known. While modernist, Art Deco was perhaps too populist an expression of modernism’s machine aesthetic ideology, leading to deco’s being ultimately and sadly dismissed by ‘serious’ practitioners and their academies in favor of more somber fare. Ironically, deco’s embellishment with organic motifs and stylized figures doomed it to a short life even if those embellishments were crafted in the same materials, precision, means of that modernism propounded. Given its rather short life and relatively meager legacy, we are fortunate indeed to have such a building as SAAM, and that it is open to all to relish in.Screen-Detail-small-687x422

Among modern materials, aluminum figures prominently, including in many Art Deco designs such as at SAAM. While not a new material, aluminum’s manufacturing costs had been significantly reduced by the late 19th and early 20th century making it more readily available (until then, it was priced as was silver). Continue reading →

CHS Schemata | Marking time at Capitol Hill’s Bertschi School

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABertschi School is a private K – Fifth grade school on 10th Avenue E, on the northern slopes of Capitol Hill. Founded in 1975, and steadily growing to its current enrollment of about 235 students, its measured and incremental growth on the Hill is a fascinating example of both architecture’s and landscape’s marking of time as well as the fulfillment of the vision of the school’s founder to support high quality and progressive design.

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CHS Schemata | A surprising loop through Saint Mark’s Greenbelt

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(Images: John Feit)

(Images: John Feit)

After several unsuccessful years of hoping to come across the St Mark’s Greenbelt during one of my neighborhood walks, I resolved this past spring to make a dedicated effort to find it. Although I had yet to visit it, I imagined the Greenbelt would present a unique environment to enjoy Capitol Hill, and another pathway to connect the highlands of 10th Avenue with the lowlands of Lakeview Drive. Google maps revealed that the Greenbelt is between the Blaine Street hill-climb and St Mark’s Cathedral. I decided to make a bit on a loop of my search, and took the long drop down the Blaine Street hill-climb from 10th Avenue to Lakeview Boulevard, after which I planned to ascend back up to Tenth through the Greenbelt itself.

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CHS Schemata | 11th Ave’s eclectic mix

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There is a collection of four apartment/condominium buildings on 11th Avenue just south of Volunteer Park that merit special attention from architecture and landscape buffs on Capitol Hill. While they all share fine materials, detailing, and wonderfully maintained landscapes, each has enough difference from one another – as well as from the typical Capitol Hill apartment building – that they simultaneously stand in distinction from our typical apartment flats and are yet simultaneously unified by their overall quality.

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CHS Schemata | Capitol Hill’s fabulous Streissguth Gardens

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Anne and Dan Streissguth (Images: John Feit with permission to CHS)

Anne and Dan Streissguth (Images: John Feit with permission to CHS)

For as long as I have lived on the Hill, I have not only enjoyed the many fine views our particular situation presents us, but also the many stairs (or, in Seattle parlance, hill climbs) that dot our landscape, providing even more vantage points to take it all in. Among my Capitol Hill favorites is the Blaine Street hill climb, which is perhaps the longest and best located of them all. Yet, it is not only its length that distinguishes it above its peers, nor its spectacular views. Instead, the Streissguth Gardens, which are adjacent to and south of the hill climb, between 10th Ave E and Broadway, raise this hill climb to a must-visit status for all Capitol Hill and Seattle residents.

The idea for this post has been germinating for over two years, originating when I made the hill climb part of my morning run. Admiring it in the predominantly twilight early morning hours, I passed by dozens of times, leaving determined to explore the garden in more favorable lighting and without sleep still in my eyes. Imagine my fantastic luck when the very spring afternoon I set forth on my task, none other than Ann Streissguth was tending her family’s masterwork. Fantastic luck indeed, as Ann graciously and spontaneously led me on what must have been a one and one half hour tour of the garden. The artist’s tour of her life’s great passion and creation proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing blend of creativity, planning, space, and time.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Developed gradually over the course of more than forty years, the gardens have grown from a tangled and disordered hillside to approximately one acre of ornamental gardens and tamed woodland. The oldest gardens surround the family’s two houses on Broadway East, just north of the East Blaine hill climb. These gardens remain private, but visitors are welcome by appointment. The newer portions of the gardens lie south of the East Blaine stairs and they are now publicly owned and open to visitors year-round.

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