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Chart Toppers and Heart-Stoppers
A Review by Elana Chan
Some might think walking tours are for tourists and architecture tours are for nostalgia buffs,
but SAF's Greatest Hits: Chart Toppers and Heart-Stoppers is both enriching and entertaining for residents and visitors alike. This tour examines more than just buildings: it also delves into stories about people who designed them, used them and continue to be inspired by them.
The tour begins with the Cobb Building, completed in 1910,
the same year Washington women gained the right to vote.
Seattleites had just hosted the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition
and it was a time of great growth for the city.
The Cobb Building is also the only surviving building of a
large-scale downtown development — a "city within a city" — that was designed by the New York firm of Howells and Stokes to create a vibrant commercial core on the Metropolitan Tract (the original site of the University of Washington).
Yet walking by this Beaux Arts brick and terra cotta masterpiece
which now houses luxury apartments, one might hardly realize its
historical significance. That is part of the SAF's walking tour
experience. Without exaggerating their historical importance or
present beauty, we are (re)introduced to buildings that have
survived both deterioration through time and cultural changes.
Many have also endured change of ownership and demand of space usage:
the Northern Life Insurance Company might have moved on,
but the magnificent Seattle Tower that it built still stands today
as an office building. The tour also explains how other historical
structures are preserved and upgraded to suit today's needs.
The Greatest Hits tour is not, however, just "golden oldies".
A number of attractions are modern structures built within the
last decade, including Rem Koolhaus' Seattle Central Library and
NBBJ's Seattle Justice Center. The tour showcase contemporary architects who are setting sights on environmentally sustainable construction methods to build new structures while finding innovative ways to preserve historical ones.
Information about the buildings is interspersed with anecdotes about cultural and political history and the way Seattle has evolved from a timber town to a world-class city during the past 150+ years.
SAF's volunteer Tour Guides personalize their presentations, so no two tours are exactly alike, except that they all meet the Foundation's standard for accuracy and are delivered with passion.
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