Street Critic | Our neighborhood series: Inform Interiors

 

Inform Interiors is located at 1526 Bellevue Ave. You can learn more at informinteriors.design.

The Street Critic is an occasional CHS special featuring architectural and design observations from the built environments on and around Capitol Hill. This special neighborhood series has been created to highlight features of some of the area’s most important gathering places as restaurants, bars, cafes, and shops face unprecedented challenges during the ongoing pandemic. Is there a space you would like us to feature? Let us know in the comments.

 

PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.

 

 

Street Critic | Our neighborhood series: Mamnoon

Mamnoon is located at 1508 Melrose. You can learn more at mamnoonrestaurant.com.

The Street Critic is an occasional CHS special featuring architectural and design observations from the built environments on and around Capitol Hill. This special neighborhood series has been created to highlight features of some of the area’s most important gathering places as restaurants, bars, cafes, and shops face unprecedented challenges during the ongoing pandemic. Is there a space you would like us to feature? Let us know in the comments.

 

PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.

 

 

Street Critic | On 13th Ave, Onion Dome mysteries revealed

13th Ave’s St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral (Image: John Feit)

Regardless of how modest the structure, ecclesiastical architecture has a unique expressive ability. No better example of simple forms melded with powerful symbolism exists on Capitol Hill than St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral, on 13th Ave between Howell and Olive. The simplest of brick boxes, the church relies on exotic details and forms to announce its Orthodox beliefs, setting it apart from all other churches in the neighborhood. Continue reading

Street Critic: Eastlake’s Mid-Century Masterworks

The Eastlake neighborhood is only five blocks west of Volunteer Park but its even closer proximity to Lake Union makes it a neighborhood quite different than Capitol Hill. Highlighting this difference are buildings representative of Eastlake’s commercial and maritime heritage which range from small, jewel-box like office buildings to large industrial structures.

Eastlake engages Lake Union in a variety of ways including seven ‘streetend parks’, such as Lynn Street Park. The streetends give one a chance to launch a Kayak, play catch with your dog, or simply to watch boats and seaplanes skim the lake’s surface. Some folks are so captivated by such water-borne activities that they have decided to live on the water, making Eastlake’s houseboat community the largest in Seattle.

Continue reading

Street Critic | 17th Ave is as good as it gets

The Barbara Frietchie

The Barbara Frietchie

Great urban landscapes are typically comprised of a collection of good buildings and landscapes instead of superlative singular designs. 17th Ave, between E. Union and E. Spring, is just such a landscape and warrants a visit. On this stretch of 17th, one will find a half dozen apartment buildings which individually may stir only a passing (if admiring) glance, yet as an ensemble are a gift to behold. Many of the buildings were built (and perhaps designed?) by the same developer, Samuel Anderson, in the 1920s.

The most conspicuous of the apartments, owing both to its advantageous corner location at the intersection of 17th and E Spring and to its equally proud corner entry, is The Barbara Frietchie. It is one of the very few co-ops in Seattle. More common in New York City, co-ops were a form of apartment ownership that pre-dates condominiums. Perhaps its New York roots account for its being the most visible – ostentatious, even – of the bunch? Its unique quarter-round entry portico set in a subtractive corner is another feature that hints of its big-city aspirations. Continue reading

Street Critic | A visit to Roanoke, an island of North Capitol Hill floating beyond 520

Stay-in-place has had a tremendous impact on us all, forcing changes in routines that affect travel, employment, recreation, socialization, as well as physical and mental well-being. It does, however, offer us opportunities often overlooked as we tend to our normal lives. One of the best is taking a fresh look at the landscape around us and exploring overlooked places close to home. One such overlooked place for many of us who live on Capitol Hill includes the Roanoke neighborhood. Had Highway 520 not been built this neighborhood would be squarely within neighborhood consciousness.

Having recently walked (again and again) Pike/Pine, Broadway, Volunteer, and Cal Anderson Parks, as well as 12th, 15th, and 19th Avenues, it seemed a good time to head north and reacquaint myself with what lies just beyond 520. Continue reading

Street Critic | Capitol Hill-style classic car field report: ‘a fleeting grand era of industrial design’

There are certain ages where the zeitgeist leads to incredibly potent creative output.

Hellenistic Sculpture of the 4th through the 2nd Centuries BCE; Germanic orchestral and chamber music from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries; High-Modern Architecture from the early 20th Century through the 1930s; and Jazz from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s come to mind.

Of far lesser importance, but still a personal favorite, is automotive design from the early 1960s through the early 1970s; where, like the above-stated periods, no wrong could be done (okay, I’m excluding the Ford Pinto and AMC Gremlin, among others). Granted, a BMW 2002 or Alfa Romeo Giulia does not rank with the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy, or Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus in artistic merit, but as exemplars of grand design in their respective field, they hold their own. As luck would have it, the benign (i.e. non-salted) roads of the Pacific Northwest provide a good habitat (as it were) for conserving cars of this vaunted era.

While poking around Capitol Hill photographing architecture and landscape, I occasion upon a few prized specimens; happening frequently enough, as it turns out, to begin to share them. Thus, begins the hoped-for first of several reports memorializing a fleeting grand era of industrial design.

Continue reading

Capitol Hill Street Critic | St. Joseph’s art deco mastery

(Images: John Feit)

Few building typologies have the history or endurance of the basilica. First appearing about the 2nd Century BCE, the basilica evolved from its initial, secular roots as a building housing courts and other civic functions to the archetypal building form for Christian houses of worship. Capitol Hill’s own St. Joseph’s church, at 19th Avenue and Aloha Street, is both an outstanding example of the basilica typology as well as of art deco architecture. Continue reading

Street Critic | The Diabolical Diagonal — the architecture of the angled streets that climb Capitol Hill

Capitol Hill streets and building parcels are almost uniformly delineated by an orthogonal grid; however, when confronted with the second part of our neighborhood’s name the ubiquitous grid revealed its limitation as an all-inclusive planning tool and left city planners little choice but to utilize diagonal streets to ascend and descend our heights. Diagonal streets present a foil to the well-ordered grid, yet most buildings conform to the grid even when the site is an unconventional shape. There are reasons to stay square when designing a building, but design opportunities are sacrificed when the only nod given to an atypical, non-orthogonal site is to design an orthogonal building and treat its diagonally bounded site simply as a remainder to be ‘planted-up’.

The Hill’s longest and steepest diagonal street, Belmont Avenue, exhibits a variety of design solutions to the grid’s disruptive diagonal. The first approach, illustrated in two variants below, plays to both diagonal and grid in a manner that preserves the conflicting geometries. The third solution is a rarely seen hybrid approach where the geometries of grid and diagonal are blended and create unexpectedly complex forms. which gave us a pair of delightful mid-century apartments. Continue reading

Street Critic | Capitol Hill’s concrete sentinels

The Shannon View from Southeast (Images: John Feit)

Cast-in-place concrete was the touchstone modernist material. When combined with steel reinforcing it allowed for the long-span and tall buildings that late 19th and early 20th Century architects dreamt of. Furthermore, and unlike the steel buried in its slurry, concrete did not corrode or lose strength in fires allowing for it to have a forthright expression without the need for any protective paint, coating, or enclosure. It was able to be left bare and pure as both structure and enclosure. It achieved, in other words, all that could be hoped for in a modern material. Its apogee in the United States was from the late 1950’s until the mid-1970’s and Belmont Avenue East has three consecutive mid-rise condominium buildings – the Shannon, the Highlander, and the Lamplighter – that pay homage to that era. Their mid-century designs have a surprising upside, too. Continue reading