Major institutions should not be immune from Seattle's pedestrian-friendly municipal code

SEATTLE'S Municipal Code ensures a lively, safe pedestrian environment by regulating the uses and amount of blank walls that line city streets.

These laws are enforced, in part, during public meetings when review boards recommend or reject proposed designs. However, projects built by major institutions are exempt from public review due to a bargain struck in the1980s, when the city traded design regulation of large institutions for an agreement that they not expand into surrounding neighborhoods.

The difference between the review process for major institutions and everybody else means that these institutions are exempt from a process that safeguards pedestrian concerns, as two projects in my neighborhood illustrate.

One project, affordable housing for formerly homeless families designed by Roderick A. Butler for Catholic Community Services (CCS), recently underwent a second public review after a two-year effort to secure financing. Located at 100 23rd Ave. S. in the Central District, the project would be built in CCS's existing parking lot.

Butler argued that the project's economic feasibility required parking at grade within the new structure, a strategy that meant a blank wall fronting 24th Street, which would not meet code requirements for transparent, occupied uses along city streets. While acknowledging the project's worthiness, the board, myself included, rejected Butler's argument, requiring that he redesign the façade to create a more pedestrian-friendly environment.

Later that evening, I viewed the construction site of a second project, the Virginia Mason Medical Center expansion, from my apartment window. This building deviates from the Municipal Code on a much larger scale than the project I had just rejected, but as a large hospital, Virginia Mason is exempt from public review.

The hospital's Web site promises that the building design will marry the hospital's need for efficiency with the public's desire for a safe, pleasant pedestrian experience. The accompanying images indicate a transparent base, blank façades limited to the second and third floors, and a band of large windows wrapping the fourth floor.

However, the building rising on the west side of Boren Avenue between Spring and Seneca streets is almost solid concrete. At pedestrian level, the Boren façade is 76 percent blank, the Seneca façade 100 percent blank, both departing from code requirements. If parking is situated behind these walls, the building will further depart from code.

Particularly disturbing is the 131-foot-long concrete wall that begins on Boren and continues around the corner onto Seneca for the entire 116-foot length of the structure.

So far, the project suggests a concrete fortress. The 206-foot-long base along Boren averages 24 feet high and is about 82 percent solid concrete; the 116-foot-long base along Seneca averages 35 feet high and is about 79 percent solid concrete. These are optimistic estimates because some openings could be closed with garage doors.

In all fairness, the hospital was responsive to public opposition during the planning stages, reducing the building height from 240 feet to 145 feet. But the design itself was exempt from the public review that Butler's affordable housing must undergo.

As part of a large institution, the expansion, designed by NBBJ, was subject only to review by a citizen's advisory committee. I serve on such a committee for Swedish Medical Center and can attest to the token role these committees play. For example, the Swedish committee debated another NBBJ design at length, only to learn that the new facility was already approved.

Seattle's design review process intends that no project, no matter how worthy, will rise above the law. But without public scrutiny, buildings such as the Virginia Mason Medical Center expansion can evade regulations that ensure a lively pedestrian environment.