«
»

Was Prince-Ramus right?

AIA Seattle recently held a post-op of this year’s honor awards. A panel of winners and AIA Seattle organizers discussed what the awards mean to the architectural community vs. what they mean to everybody else, and how that has changed over the years. A constant, said many participants, is controversy.

Sterling ResidenceMost of this year’s controversy talk has focused on the Sterling house on Queen Anne built by Pb Elemental, as has a lot of recent media coverage of the awards, this paper included.

But what about the criticisms of Seattle architectural ethics made by the judges?

Do Seattle designers create homes of great beauty but balk at projects of civic significance? Are they “exquisite grammarians” who don’t take a position, as judge and Seattle native Joshua Prince-Ramus said at the awards ceremony in November?

Does it take an out-of-town jury to see the truth, or were they missing the big picture?

Just wondering.

Tags:

This entry was posted by Shawna Gamache on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 9:01 am and is filed under Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • John

    Houses like this that put up big walls towards the street are not friendly. They also make neighborhoods unsafe by removing the eyes on the street, so criminals can break into cars or assault people on the street and nobody will ever see it. Can you imagine a whole street lined with big walls like that? It wouldn’t be pretty.

    The interior of that house is probably excellent, but the exterior is just bad for everyone, including the owners, who have simply made their neighborhood less friendly and more easy for crime to happen.

  • Jim Sullivan

    How important is site planning in the architect panel’s judgement of design quality? In this case, Sterling House appears to block the oh-so-precious wintertime sunlight from its hapless neighbor to the north to the greatest extent possible, given that it seems to completely exploit the building code height limit. On the positive side, the east elevation of Sterling House presents its neighbors across the street with a perfect projection screen and an opportunity to sponsor a neighborhood-scale drive-in (or walk-over) movie some evening.

  • Josh Smit

    I would have to disagree with both of you. First of all have you ever been on Queen Anne Ave, it’s a very busy and load street in that area, drivers speed by at unsafe speed. All the houses on the street have their blinds closed 99% of the time for privacy (there are no eyes on the street from the homes, only from people driving down the street). As far as exploiting the height limit, look at that house straight on it is consistant with the two story house to the south. They probably could have built 3-4′ higher, or 15′ if it was a pitched roof (look how ominous the three story (new) craftsmans are on 1st Ave N. We live in an amazing liberal City, I am glad that people have the right to express thereselfs on their own property. If not why live in the US?

  • Pingback: SeattleScape » Blog Archive » AIA Seattle winners and juror comments online