Photos by Rod Huntress
By Kimberly Kinchen
From affordable housing at Cal Anderson-adjacent Station House to a Union Street pedestrian bridge on the Central Waterfront, designs from architecture studio Schemata Workshops are fixtures on the Hill and far beyond. Co-founder Grace Kim shared some favorite volumes with us for Bookkeeping, our occasional series on the books local businesses love so much they keep them in easy reach.
How does a book make it onto this shelf? Most of the books in the office are reference books. So books we’re using for precedents or looking at typologies — other built examples with similar characteristics — to see kind of what else people are thinking about. And sometimes it’s not even the same type, like we might be looking at a compact home, but we might look at libraries, and how they might use condensed storage. Sometimes we’re trying to capture look and feel. A lot of that we can do on the internet. So a lot of the books that are here are actually much, much older, just because they’re from a time when we couldn’t search those things on the internet. . . . I guess a big way these books show up is when we’re looking for more information than what you would find on the web. So we might be searching for high density housing in Europe and find one or two projects with just a picture or two. And so then trying to dive in a little deeper and understand the project, we might see if it’s published in a book somewhere. And that will lead to other similar projects. Then we can look at what’s happening outside our area.
Tell me about one of your favorite books on the shelf. I will tell you about a current book, and it’s kind of a little promotion, but it’s also something that we just got, The Ideal City, published by SPACE10. And we got it because we are published in it. We’re just reading this now. It’s projects all around the world at a global city planning scale and then down to individual projects and how they’re addressing a sort of a utopia that’s not possible. So it’s been interesting to look at places that we’ve been to recently. We were in Seoul a couple of years ago. And there’s a project in here, Seoullo 7017 Skygarden (aka Seoul Street) by MVRDV, I wish we had known that was there. So just really cool projects that are inspiring. It’s the type of thing where I won’t spend time researching or googling random things on the internet. I just don’t have the time to do it. But having them all in one place, this whole category of projects in the vein of urban planning and sustainability and social equity, is interesting to me. And I don’t have to search for them.
What’s a book here you’d recommend to somebody interested in doing the kind of work you do? It kind of depends on what architects or people are interested in about the built environment. For me, it’s not about the form of the building, it’s more about the patterns and the way people use them…For me a formative book is Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language…He wrote the book in the 70s. It is about how civilizations have formed themselves and the patterns that have occurred over time, civilizations over time and different cultures and looking at what are the common themes? It’s really fascinating. We do work in co-housing and it’s interesting to me that sometimes we go into a workshop and half the people raise their hand to say yes, we’ve read this book. Not specifically because of co-housing — their interests have just brought them there somehow. I think that’s an interesting thing…..The way that it’s written, there’s one nugget of information. And then there’s all the background information. So it’s not a read. It’s more like you could pick a section and just peruse, flip through it.
What’s a book on the shelf that might seem like it doesn’t really belong, but it does belong? Some of these are not office books, but are relevant to the office. So The Color of Law and How to Be An Anti Racist. We have been for probably four plus years having conversations around race, and how that influences and intersects with the work that we do. The Color of Law is about neighborhoods and redlining of neighborhoods. So there’s a connection to the built environment. But we work in affordable housing, and transit and lots of different project types, recreation centers, community centers — they all have intersections with race. It’s really hard to find any project that actually doesn’t intersect with race in some way, because it’s all institutions. For us it’s very much integral to the work that we’re doing.
What are some of the newer books here? Some books on the public realm and urban landscapes. Public Spaces, Public Life and New City Spaces, both by Jan Gehl and Lars Gemzoe. The Carbon Efficient City, which is A-P Hurd in Seattle. I wouldn’t say that our practice is shifting that way, but we’re definitely paying a lot more attention to the public realm, especially beyond just parks, like — how are the street right of ways and the little in-between spaces important to the public?
And a few books that Sir David Adjaye has published, for a project that we’re working on, including Making Public Building and Living Spaces. He’s an architect that has been doing a lot with Afrocentric architecture. We’ve been looking at some of his work as inspiration for an Afrofuturist project that we are doing in the Central Area looking at different ways non-Western architecture manifests in the built environment. It’s hard to make the connection to a mixed-use building in Seattle, but we are trying to do it, trying to see what we can draw from and learn from.
Schemata Workshop is located at 1720 12th Ave. Learn more at schemataworkshop.com.
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