I read this Slog post by Dominic Holden — Enough With the Ugly-Ass Buildings — and wished I’d written something like it. Having attended design reviews for various projects across the hill, I agree that most of the designs are disappointing and don’t fit in with the neighborhoods they will someday be a part of. There was also this concept from Slog regular fnarf that seemed to make a lot of sense:

I think they should just scrap the design review altogether, and instead put a size restriction — a HORIZONTAL zoning rule, instead of a vertical one. Make it so you can’t get permission to exceed, say 100 feet of frontage within three or six blocks of any other project approved within a twenty year period. FORCE them to go with individual lots, not whole blocks. If they can’t afford to do it that way, tough; go away.

But that’s pretty much where the sense ended — the Slog comments degrade into their typical idiocy as wannabe experts argue the fine points of things they don’t really understand. So I decided to create my own Slog comment thread here on CHS featuring two experts who have something real to say about Holden’s article and the horizontal zoning concept — Eric Blank, who is part of the firm that designed the building that sparked the Slog post, and Liz Dunn, the developer behind some of the more popular designs in the Pike/Pine corridor.

Eric Blank – Nicholson Kovalchick Architects, designers of the 1650 Olive B&O project

1650 Olive ‘preferred’ design

In my humble opinion, Dominic’s article is over-the-top and a bit ridiculous, but the public discussion he’s provoked is great.  I think the overall discussion, more than any individual point in it, highlights the value of Design Review as a public forum for discussion and democratic decision-making. Aesthetics are subjective.  The city’s Design Review Guidelines do not therefore legislate a specific style. Rather they focus on amenities for the community (interesting streetscapes, careful response to surrounding buildings, overall height/bulk/scale, public space, etc).

The process also encourages designers to bring a number of different aesthetic schemes to the Early Design Guidance for the public to review and weigh in on.  In this case for instance, many people at our initial meeting requested a “more traditional” material palette and roofline that we attempted to provide in Option 3.  We are happy that last week, the public and Board favored a more honest, contemporary look like Option 2, but with a different group of neighbors on the night it could have easily gone the other way.  Regardless, we definitely support Seattle’s Design Review process and can provide you a bunch of success stories where it’s helped the public improve the design. We can also provide examples of great looking big buildings that effectively break down their mass and relate well to their neighborhood context.

Regarding the suggestion for a horizontal zoning rule, I’d ask you to consider the endless small townhouse projects up at 85th and Aurora, which very few people would support as aesthetically pleasing and there are already a bunch of similar projects springing up along 10th and 12th Avenues on Capitol Hill.  One of the comments mentions FAR as a potential alternative and you can look to other states such as CA for success stories there. I can also tell you that building construction naturally limits the height of buildings. For instance, wood structure is cheapest, but limited to 5 stories by the building code for fire safety.

Liz Dunn – Dunn + Hobbes, LLC, designer of the 12th Ave Marketplace project

 

12th Ave Marketplace project

Building scale is absolutely the biggest issue we face with the design of new projects in our fine-grained neighborhoods. We do all this handwringing over architectural style – which is totally subjective territory — when in fact if we only focused on the two issues of façade width and on getting tall, fully glazed (untinted) street level spaces (that ideally open up to the outside), we’d be SO much further ahead. Retail spaces need to be narrow enough and DIVERSE enough, and there need to be enough of them on a block, to maintain the economic “ecosystem” of local restaurant, retail and arts organizations that make neighborhoods like Pike-Pine thrive. It gets not just to the aesthetic issues but what makes a neighborhood tick. 

And I completely agree with the comments that height is a red herring. If we got skinny interesting buildings with great small-scale street level spaces, height just wouldn’t matter.  The problem is that community groups won’t believe that until it happens, and they’ll keep it from happening, and so they’ll get the same old big-box crap.

 

It all goes hand in hand with preservation. If we created mandates and incentive that guided development toward skinny buildings, there would be far less incentive for deveopers to tear down the old buildings to assemble large sites. Granted there are some other things that need to happen to level the playing field between old buildings and new development – most importantly a program for transfer of development rights (TDRs) that would let old building owners sell their unused FAR to new developments.

The city is supposed to be overhauling the design review guidelines at this very moment, so now is absolutely the time to have this debate. There is also a new Pike-Pine Conservation overlay that proposes footprint limits, for exactly the reasons discussed. This discussion should also be put front and center in the neighborhood planning process.

For more on the Pike/Pine Conservation process, check out How to save Pike/Pine: data, maps, proposals from our CHS archives.