New public spaces are potent symbols of a confident city

Seattle is not the first city one usually thinks of when thinking of quality public architecture. Maybe it has something to do with our being such a young city or such a Northwest city, or maybe it's just the weather. But that is all changing. Not the weather, but the way we design and build our public places.

Like it or not, Seattle has entered a new age of architecture, an impressive rush of new buildings, parks and public spaces all coming out of the ground in the last five years or going up in the next two.

Consider for a moment the magnitude of what has been built, what is in the pipeline, and what is on the drawing board. It is an unprecedented explosion of civic building — more than $2.5 billion worth of public buildings, libraries, a City Hall, an Opera House, major civic open spaces, and parks, parks, parks.

It is, in part, a legacy of the go-go '90s and the extraordinary accumulation of private wealth during a decade of bull markets, public confidence and voter generosity.

This is definitely not your father's Seattle, a city content with a cheap, undistinguished office building for its City Hall and the pedestrian Kingdome as its sports stadium.

The really old cities, the cities of Europe and the older Eastern cities of our country, have a history of important public buildings and great civic spaces.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is a 2,000-year-old capital city on the ancient silk road of Central Asia. For 25 years, it has been Seattle's Sister City.

I visited Tashkent in 1980 as mayor of Seattle. The mayor of Tashkent took me on a tour, and the subway, or Metro, was our first stop. I couldn't believe what we found underground. A massive room with Uzbek art, tile and mosaic. And above it all, row upon row of crystal chandeliers bathing the whole extraordinary space in light and color. It was a temple.

I said to the mayor of this poor city of 2 million people, "How in the world did you get away with this incredible opulence?"

"Well," he said, "it's about us, it's about who we are, where we came from and what we value. And, after all, it is for the people."

In Seattle, our new buildings and new spaces will surely help to shape the way we live and the way we feel about ourselves as a community. All of them represent a change in the way we have thought about architecture in Seattle, and in the way we have regarded and built our civic infrastructure.

Take the old City Hall for example. Somebody, please, take the old City Hall! When I ran for mayor in 1977, I wanted nothing more than to take up residence in that awful building. When I was elected, I realized that the best thing about being in City Hall was not having to look at it.

The building, a knock-off design of a Texas office building, was in its own way an expression of Seattle values in 1960. Get it done, and get it done without frills or fancy stuff. Plus, there was no danger that anybody in government was ever going to feel too important or too princely in that building. In fact, the reverse happened. As the building deteriorated, so did the way employees dressed, and, I think, the way they regarded themselves and their work.

Our public buildings — schools, city halls, the courts — say a lot about our values and how we feel about the public realm and the people who do its work.

Our City Hall was a powerful statement on behalf of civic frugality, but came up a little short as a symbol of civic engagement. It lasted 40 years. Probably 20 more than were good for it or for the people who had to work there.

The new City Hall will reflect different values, including now the value of good design befitting an important public building. But it will also respect solid Seattle values such as public accessibility, attention to conservation, the environment and efficiency of operation. It will also be beautiful, in a Northwest wood, wind and water kind of way.

It will be part of what is called the Civic Center campus, which includes the high-rise Gateway Tower, now a city-owned office building, a new Justice Center for courts and police, and a new civic plaza between Fifth and Fourth avenues. Still to be designed and paid for is a promising but challenging civic space on a full block replacing the old Public Safety Building, which was neither public nor safe.

The campus is a melding of the old and the new, at once practical and inspirational as an expression of civic and aesthetic values. And for once, we paid attention to design and to design process. Can anything be more scary than the City Council trying to design something? Well, the council did a pretty good job, working fairly well with a mayor who understood design and development.

Paul Schell, developer and former dean of the University of Washington's School of Architecture, had the ability to visualize the whole civic campus and to make certain it was built on solid Seattle values. Schell understood that public buildings can and will send messages to those who work in them and those whose taxes have paid for them. They are powerfully symbolic and political, and therefore, risky.

Just up the street from the new City Hall, an even riskier design is taking shape in the form of the new Central Library. Like City Hall, this building reflects the values of conservation and efficiency. But it is unabashedly designed to break new ground in architecture, to challenge and inspire.

Designed by Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect and winner of one of architecture's highest honors, the Pritzker Prize, the $156 million Central Library will be one of those buildings people may love and perhaps hate. But when Aunt Em comes to town, people will surely take her to see it. It will be an important building, reflecting the changing nature of architecture and the new age of information systems.

A city playing a leadership role in the new information economy will have a leadership building to store and dispense information. And this city will have a new icon.

These new public buildings are doing what public buildings are supposed to do. Even before they are finished, they are political and controversial, sending out messages and symbolism, eliciting comment pro and con.

What is remarkable is that architecture is such big news in Seattle, with letters to the editor, op-ed pieces and editorials — some grumpy about "fancy outside architects" and "wasteful government spending," others debating earnestly the question, "What is the Seattle Style?"

Like it or not, this massive rebuilding of the city's civic infrastructure shows that we have moved from making do in our public buildings and civic spaces to doing it well.

And we have defined doing it well as doing it with high-profile, internationally known architects like Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Peter Bohlin and the hot Weiss/Manfredi team designing the spectacular Olympic Sculpture Park on the waterfront.

This rankles some, who think local is better. But now, local is good, too. The local firms of NBBJ (the new federal courthouse, the Justice Center, Safeco Field) and LMN Architects (Benaroya Hall, the Convention and Trade Center expansion, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall), among other firms, have become important national and international players, and in the process have helped to raise expectations of design at home.

But this period of investment and reinvestment in civic Seattle is not just about good architecture. It is remarkable, too, in its sheer scope and reach. There is not a neighborhood that does not get a new, renovated or expanded library, park, or community center: almost $200 million in parks, open spaces, pedestrian and bike trails, recreation facilities and programs; almost a quarter of a billion public and private dollars to double the square footage of Seattle's library system. And the list goes on.

Clearly, people want and value these community assets, they want them to be high quality, they want them to last, and they are willing to pay for them.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln insisted that building the great Capitol dome continue even though manpower and money were scarce and people were more concerned about the mounting death toll and the future of a country than they were about a building. But Lincoln understood the power. He knew that a rising dome, a symbol of a nation coming together, spoke more powerfully even than his words, and that making new symbols could be as powerful as preserving old ones.

In Seattle, now in harder times than the 1990s, we are, in this massive rebuilding of our civic places, creating some new and powerful symbols of our own. And, not unimportant in these times, the construction is generating hundreds of millions of dollars of much-needed stimulus to our economy.

What does all this say about our city and how we feel about ourselves?

I think it says we want quality in our built environment as much as we want and value quality in our unparalleled natural environment. I think it says we value community because we are creating beautiful spaces where people can come together at the water's edge or at the window on the mountain.

I think it says we have come to the conclusion, as a community, that how well we build our public places determines in very large part how well we live in them. And I think it says despite all the ups and downs in the economy and spirit department, we feel good about ourselves and where we are privileged to live.

Charles Royer is national program director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Urban Health Initiative. He also is a senior lecturer at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.