(Image: Seattle University)
This week brings plans for an August 2026 groundbreaking and design renderings for the planned $25 million Seattle University Museum of Art on 12th Ave.
The realities of the project are also hitting home as Seattle University and the Cornish College of the Arts announced the termination of 354 employees and are moving forward with plans to demolish the Lee Center for the Arts performance and studio space.
The intertwined announcements follow Seattle U’s takeover of Cornish and its South Lake Union campus as the arts school has suffered a continued downturn in enrollment.
The addition of Cornish to Seattle U, meanwhile, boosts the private Jesuit university’s arts presence which includes launching its plans around a major donation from property developer Dick Hedreen and his family’s 200-piece, $300 million collection of paintings, pottery, photography, etchings, and sculptures.
The donation, the largest gift of art to any university in the United States, includes $25 million in funding earmarked to begin development of the Seattle University Museum of Art, “a teaching museum that will showcase centuries of art history and be a true learning extension of the classroom,” Seattle U said.
The planned demolition of the Lee Center to make way for the new museum will shift Seattle’s live performance resources off 12th Ave to the newly added Cornish facilities. CHS reported here on pushback from the Seattle U theater community over the plans.
As for the employees laid off under the merger plan, the school told the Seattle Times some faculty and staff will be hired back.
UPDATE: The school has updated is information about the layoffs. “Seattle University is evaluating hiring decisions,” a statement on the changes from Seattle U reads. “We anticipate making offers to most Cornish faculty and staff to ensure continuity and support for Cornish students throughout this transition and beyond. Our commitment is to both maintain and enhance the high-quality education and support that Cornish students have come to expect. This includes additional services, support and activities available to all Seattle University students.”
“Overall, Seattle University’s pay scales are higher than those of Cornish,” the university says. “The plan is to make all decisions as soon as possible and before the end of May.”
The new museum will be designed by Tom Kundig of Seattle’s Olson Kundig and Sellen Construction will serve as the contractor. Two years of construction are planned with a grand opening slated for fall of 2028.
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Is Seattle U making an avoidable mistake? Well yes.
There are a few rules hard and fast laws in architectural urbanism that shouldn’t be ignored. For example, you shouldn’t cram thousands of desperately poor people into neighborhoods that can’t support them (Little Saigon). You also shouldn’t demolish perfectly functional, elegant and carefully crafted civic buildings that are beloved (Penn Station).
You also should put up blank perimeter walls around urban universities – it leads to negative associations of us vs. them, exclusion, and heirarchy. Universities have a responsibility to contribute to civic life by giving back to the neighborhood and the people it took the land from – in this case the university namesake Chief Seattle but also the condemned “urban blight” homes left behind during the 1940’s Japanese internment. SU made the case for this condemnation tot he Federal Government so that it could claim the land for the 1948 university expansion. Ouch.
Occupying less than 20% of the enormous parking lot along 12th, the Lee Center is an above-average adaptive reuse, and there is nothing more sustainable (and better for the climate) than making an old industrial building useful for another 50 years – unless of course, you demolish that rehab for no defensible reason in under 19.
What is the “reason” not being talked about? Likely a self a agrandizing architect scraping away the context to put his stamp on a row of three consecutive 12th ave buildings by the same firm. SU apparently does not have the expertise to point out the obvious or to remember the battles that were fought years ago to get the campus to face the city and part of it.
The Lee Center was an example of how to give back. The $6.8 Mil retrofit is tailor-fit and a generous gift to 12th Ave by offering an easy visual invitation to the contemporary art on display and a theater widely enjoyed. As we have heard from current users, the Lee Theater is beloved and easy for campus students to attend. The same will not be said of the far away Denny campus.
According to the rendering, the proposed musuem gives nothing back to the 12th Avenue streetscape other than a bizarrely large foyer. As a reference for the lack of generosity inherent in the proposed design, one need only look to the shanked design that is the Burke Museum – another blank butt to the public for the UW fortress perimeter – in that case blank walls of old growth Canadian vertical grain ancient cedars with no indication what is happening inside and nothing for the pedestrians to share in. There is nothing sustainable about cutting the last tracts of indigenous BC forests to achieve the patina of environmental responsibility.
The right move in this situation would be to preserve Lee and let non-theater students use it, or a struggling theater non-profit, or an indigenous group, or a Japanese organization. But to demolish the community investment it represents is a total faceplant by a residential architect who doesn’t understand how to pull off contributive urbanism.
Correct me if I’m wrong but, isn’t Lee being flattened to pander to a donor with an art collection? This and Cornish have little to do with serving the community.
It’s not for the community, and it’s not for the students. It might add to the university’s assets on paper, but not in a way that helps them serve their mission. It’s a real shame.
Agreed. That building & the program it serves are absolute underrated gems & it’s a damn shame that they’re doing this.
So your main problem is that Seattle University is going to replace a bland, one-story building that houses a small arts space and a black-box theater used by its 15 theatre majors with a world class art museum–all while it sustains the existence of a fantastic local arts college with its own incredible performance spaces (I count at least five)? Cornish’s theater program is going to put Seattle U on the map. This will hardly have a dampening effect on arts in Seattle, quite the opposite.
Build art gallery while defunding art eduction ?
They claim they’re putting money in, but haven’t shown anything for that beyond plans to bail out a failing art school. Do I think Cornish & its students deserve to thrive? Absolutely. But SU isn’t doing it for art’s sake–they’re doing it for optics & a vanity project, at the expense of existing students and resources.
While you wait for someone to ‘do it’ purely for ‘art’s sake’, art spaces will shutter around you. Cornish, like too many small, highly specialized colleges across the U.S., was going to close. Seattle was going to lose an historic arts college. When that happened, some faceless tech company was going to buy Cornish’s campus for pennies on the dollar and turn it into a server farm so you could play CandyCrush while sitting on the can.
Instead of that worst case scenario, Seattle University found a way to acquire the college while it builds a teaching museum on its campus. I’m a prospective student who wants to be an artist and I’m looking at universities in 2029 and I see that I can get a BFA in Seattle at Seattle University from storied and expert arts faculty associated with Cornish College of the Arts. And my campus has a world class art museum. It’s a no-brainer for students and for supporters of the arts in Seattle and beyond.
Oh why another Kundig bldg?ugh – This would’ve been a great opportunity to bring in a more interesting design firm.
Another massive box that offers almost nothing to the general public in terms of greenery or visual interest. Not as egregious as the second Convention Center but in the same family.
The cantilevered corner on that building is so unnecessary and exemplary of this whole project, an ego-stroking mistake.
I really want someone to do a deep dive of Hedreen and his dealings around the city, there’s so much backroom dealing from his development days, I can only imagine we’d learn a lot about the failures of profit-motivated development in Seattle.
Yep. At this point it seems safe to say it’s just to sure it’s to maintain sightlines/light pointing at the chapel, as was the rumor for a while, since they initially said the new museum would go next to the Lee Center, not take the place of it. They’re destroying a new & functional building used for hands-on education (and one that’s a great example of adaptive reuse, at that!) for this…thing.
Guess I shouldn’t be shocked that a Catholic institution is going to value aesthetics & wealth over the well-being of its young people, though! I thought the Jesuits were above that, but the new president isn’t exactly Father Steve…he’s a buisness & law guy.