Thanks for posting the image! Capitol Hill Seattle got a quote yesterday morning from Liz Dunn after she took a look at the design - she likes it:
โI think of all the large developments being planned for the neighborhood right now, these guys actually seem to get the whole point of conservation overlay, and seem to be trying hard to achieve the โwin-winโ. In other words -- adding lots of housing units while actually reusing the old buildings as assets, largely intact, in a way that will drive value and street traffic, instead of just keeping a couple of pasted-on facades to satisfy the letter of the ordinance. It helps that they have an architect -- David Hewitt -- who is taking the design challenges of merging the old and new structures very seriously.โ
I like it. Good setbacks for the new parts, sophisticated massing that provides asymmetrical visual balance. Materials and finishes and color schemes could make the actual construction look wretched, however.
Based on these drawing alone, I concur with #3. 100% improvement over the more "we love this lake so much, we drained it so you could live here" approach taken just up the street.
Kind of hard to tell much about this by this rather vague rendering but it seemed to me like there was a good opportunity to do something that had an interesting dialog with the existing structures and that does not appear to be what is going to happen. Not too surprising as most architects are not allowed to do anything interesting even if they have a clue largely due to the fact that most developers are greedy yahoos completely devoid of imagination.
@8, sometimes they cantilever or bridge over the old building and then just blend/overlap the exterior claddings so that it's pretty much watertight, but it's also common to gut part or all of the interior of the older structure (even if the original floorplan is to be maintained) and put new columns right up through the old structure that either coninue in the new portion or tie into horizontal elements of the new structure. They might choose the column spacing to match the old structure so that when the old structure's interior is restored/replaced the new steel or concrete columns are hidden in the walls.
@9, I live a few blocks from here and I can point to parking lot after parking lot after 60's shitbox after parking lot that would make better candidates for redevelopment than this block in question--one of the densest blocks with interesting, locally owned businesses that gives the neighborhood the character that somewhat justifies exorbitant rent. If we didn't throw a collective shit fit, the Bellevue developers would've just razed Bauhaus and the other businesses without a second thought.
JK, what else are you gonna do? It's an impossible task.