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Construction, design amaze in Seattle

 

You’ve probably seen construction images in recent years of soaring cranes above Berlin, Shanghai or other big cities.

Magazine and newspaper editors love running them to illustrate growth spurts, particularly in a super metropolis.

Seattle, of course, does not have the same number of people as these places. But construction continues even as the recession lingers.

Usually, sites are easy to overlook. Sometimes, they lack enough activity at a particular moment.

But when my family and I were running errands and driving along Boren Avenue, I looked up and said: “Look at that.”

Crane booms, cable lines and shapes came together to make for a mosaic against the blue sky.

We had some free time. So, I pulled over at Seneca Street and Boren Avenue.

A construction worker clung to the side of the building. About a dozen or so people stood on the sidewalks and looked up.

Workers prepared a huge steel frame that I think a crane later lifted. The repetition of black space, where windows will eventually go on one wall, caught my attention.

A woman wearing a hard hat told me the construction is an addition to Virginia Mason Medical Center.

The construction and design of buildings have long held my interest.

I think it started the old-fashioned way – when I was a kid, put pencil to paper and drew an elementary building with windows.

My mom, who is an artist, reminded me to fill up the paper with lines, shapes, people – whatever I wanted to do to make sure there was enough activity in my scene.

From there, I graduated to playing with wooden blocks and LEGO pieces.

Two artists, Sean Kenney and Nathan Sawaya, continue to create with the plastic bricks.

As a young adult, trips to New York City, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Hong Kong and Shanghai helped inspire me. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit those places.

In Berlin, I looked at Bauhaus-inspired buildings.

On my trips to the Guangzhou area in the 1990s, I saw so much architectural clutter (by Western standards) and diversity that it became a context in and of itself – kind of like China, I suppose.

That included structures with overhangs built by Europeans, boxy, plain buildings that China’s communist leaders wanted and much demolition, often by hand.

As a newspaper reporter, I wrote about Will Flannery, who works at a Seattle vaccum cleaner store. He created the Space Needle, robots, UFOs and other sculptures out of old models.

 

 

 

After I took some digital images of the construction on Boren, I returned to our car.

Our son wanted to see the workers and machines in action. I carried him in my arms and walked back to the construction zone.

His eyes became bigger when he saw the cranes and people in hard hats and safety vests.

At home, he and I often stack wooden blocks as high as we can with the best foundations that come to our minds.

When we do this, I think of a simple thought: I wonder if this is going to work.