In the prosperous and cozy section of Queen Anne Avenue North
between West McGraw Street and West Smith Street, one house stands out.
It’s called Sterling Residence. It’s three stories high, white,
modern, belted by a perimeter wall, and has an enclosed garden of
white and black rocks. This house says nothing to the others that
surround it. Because the back of Sterling Residence faces the street,
its front facing the alley, it upsets its neighbors with the bold
indifference of a three-story windowless wall.
“I should get a permit from the city and show movies on there in the
summer,” said Jennifer Geist, who’s in her mid 40s, is as spirited as
her surname, and lives directly across the street from Sterling
Residence. Her home is snug, wood-warm, filled with the images and
smells of well-being. Earlier, after she welcomed me (a complete
stranger) into her home, she said that none other than the Dalai Lama
was coming to Seattle very soon and that this was a big story, one I
should look into (instead of looking into her house). And as she led me
to the living room, I thought of how the Italian filmmaker Bernardo
Bertolucci, when shooting the opening scenes of his 1993 film
Little Buddha in a Queen Anne home designed by the local
architect Larry Rouch, had to harden the house’s modernisms,
sharpen the severity of its interior spaces, and make its colors harsher.
Had he used Geist’s house for those scenes, a complete change would have been
necessary. Everything you need to raise a perfect little Buddha is
here.
I was sitting in the living room shortly after dusk, a fat and
fluffy cat on my lap, and Geist was sitting on the couch across from
me. Between us: a large window filled with the growing/glowing
whiteness of Sterling Residence. “I’m originally from back East, and
when my family visits me here, they are shocked by the house,” Geist
said. “My father calls it an abortion clinic.”
We watched a young couple emerge from Sterling Residence’s gate,
enter a flashy white car, and jet down the road. Geist continued, “No
one likes the building. It’s offensive. And it’s not that I’m against
new things. I have an open mind. But it’s just wrong for the street. It
has no sense of the community… Now, the architects who made it are
also working on another project not far from here, and it’s not as bad
as this one. It at least takes the other homes into consideration.”
Sterling Residence only speaks to itself or, closer yet, to another,
distant discourse that has had little or no impact on Queen
Anne—the discourse of modernism, postindustrial technologies,
urban theory. It is not a dwelling in the sense that the other homes on
this street are dwellings; it is a living machine, a robot designed for
the rational management of human beings. The neighbors may not like
Sterling Residence, and they would like the whole city also not to like
it, but precisely the opposite is happening: More and more, the bane of
the neighbors’ existence is being
recognized as a breakthrough, a
breath of much needed fresh air. In 2007, Sterling Residence was the
recipient of an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects
(AIA). This prize was not conferred entirely by outsiders. One of the
three members of the jury was Seattle native Joshua Prince-Ramus, who
codesigned the Seattle Central Library.
Sterling Residence, which was on sale last year for $1.5 million
(this is not an amazing price for this street; another much older home,
built in 1919, had a list price of $1.2 million), was designed by Pb
Elemental. The firm came into existence in 2004, when it sprang from
the minds of two ambitious students from the University of Washington’s
architecture school, Chris Pardo, 29, and David Biddle, 30. Pb
Elemental’s growth has been spectacular—from 2 to over 50
employees in just four years. The entirety of this growth has been
generated by local projects. A part of Pb Elemental’s secret to success
can be attributed to its leading program, which is the unification of
architecture (or style) with town houses. (The firm also unifies style
with single-family residences and commercial buildings.) Only two or
three firms in Seattle, as far as I can tell, are attempting to build
or maintain such a relationship—between style/modernism and town
houses. Most town houses (if they even bother to do so) turn to the
past and imitate the Seattle Box and other popular plans and designs of
the 1910s and 1920s.
You could say that Sterling Residence is the highest point of Pb
Elemental’s program and ideas. It is the point that defines the firm’s
progress thus far—a point that might be surpassed by Pb’s
Crockett Residence, which is currently under construction—and the
point of so much disturbance on the top of the once-peaceful,
once-wholesome, once-content community of Queen Anne. It’s a
disturbance of power, aesthetics, codes, modes, values, and ideas that
are plugged into a wider war for the soul/identity of this city. What
is Seattle? Is it this: in reality, a small town back then—in
essence, a small town now? Or is it this: once a small town, now a big
city? And can the values of the past be maintained in a Seattle that is
on the cutting edge of so much—aerospace, biotechnology,
information systems?
Sterling Residence brought this battle to a neighborhood that had
somehow managed to maintain a distance from the noise and banging
raging everywhere else. All over Seattle—Central District, Mount
Baker, Capitol Hill, Eastlake—new buildings are replacing old
buildings at an unprecedented pace. The past is here and there
vanishing like the contents of a dream at the moment of waking. The
construction boom had, for sure, transformed parts of Queen
Anne—particularly along Queen Anne Avenue—but not hit hard
at the heart of the neighborhood. Sterling Residence is by no means the
first modern home to be built on Queen Anne (Rouch’s Little
Buddha home, for example, was completed in the early 1990s), but
it’s certainly the loudest and most aggressive. The other modern homes
caused a stir; Sterling Residence has caused a break.
Grievances toward Sterling Residence were first publicly expressed
on the AIA website. The organization had flown three judges into
town—Frank Harmon, Jeanne Gang, and Joshua Prince-Ramus (he now
lives in New York City)—and shown them 140 projects, and one of
the seven projects they selected for a prize was Sterling Residence,
which surprisingly beat Vandeventer + Carlander Architects’ houseboat.
On a page that the AIA website dedicated to the winners, “Unbound,” one
unnamed and very upset guest wrote:
This home may be appropriate in a different context, but in a
community/neighborhood of early-20th-century homes (mostly bungalows)
this home is a stark and unwelcome contrast. I have not encountered a
single person (except perhaps the homeowners) who actually finds this
home to be inviting in any way. It is made fun of constantly and is
referred to as the giant Kleenex box littering the street.
Another guest wrote:
I live a block away and 100% of the residents on QA I have talked
with are stunned by the harsh white blank walls of this home. Many
people comment on this eyesore! The interior might be wonderful, but
the glaring exterior absolutely does not fit in this neighborhood. It
is unfriendly and boring—certainly does not promote “community.”
What were you thinking to award such a building an award? It gives
architecture a very bad name.
“Unfriendly,” “harsh,” “stark,” “unwelcome,” “stunned”—this is
the language of xenophobia. Sterling Residence is alien, strange, not a
part of the “community.” It is uncouth (in the older sense of that
word), the other, the event that disrupts long-established
certainties about the neighborhood, the institution of the family
(“it looks like an abortion clinic”), and the meaning of the city
(“this home may be appropriate in a different context”). However,
Jennifer Geist, the neighbor, admitted to me on the evening of my
surprise visit that the architectural hatred and rejection was not
universal, not “100 percent.” Her brother-in-law loves Sterling
Residence for the very same reasons it won an AIA prize: It snaps the
monotony of the street and presents a fresh opening to something new in
the neighborhood. And because the snap is so sharp, so clear, in the
context of Queen Anne, the AIA jury used it to send a loud message to
the rest of Seattle: Snap out of predictable architecture.
On December 25, 2007, Lawrence W. Cheek, who writes architecture
reviews for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reported that
after looking at the 140 projects in Seattle and surrounding areas, the
AIA jury was far from impressed with what the city had to offer. “For a
city with such strengths—education, culture, natural environment,
wealth,” they stated, “[we] hoped to see more evidence of leadership
and risk, and less comfort with an already well-digested regional
design language. Great architecture occurs when a great designer
creates new opportunity.” It wasn’t because Sterling Residence is
exceptional (the houseboat is the better building) that it won; it’s
because it delivered a great blow into the guts of “well-digested
regional design language,” the guts of Queen Anne Hill.
“We selected the Sterling Residence because of its impact on the
context,” Prince-Ramus confirmed over the phone. “It was refreshing to
see something that was outside of the language of bungalows or whatever
they call them. One of the best features of the house is on the top
floors. There you have a view of this repetition. It’s a sea of
bungalow roofs.”
When asked about his criticism of the city’s recent architecture, he
said: “For me, it was easy to be critical. I’m from Seattle. This is
where I grew up. And so I was happy that other jurors were in agreement
with how I felt. But they are not from Seattle and may not have wanted
to be so critical. But we all agreed to make the statement: The city is
not taking enough risks, not experimenting with new ideas. And this is
strange when you think about how educated, wealthy, liberal, and so on
the city is… But, yes, what excited me about [Sterling Residence] was
its willingness to do something smart, new, and different from a design
language that belongs to another age, period of time.”
Queen Anne Hill is upper-middle class, stable, and white. The
average cost of a house is nearly $800,000 dollars, making it the
third-most-expensive neighborhood in Seattle—behind Madison Park
and Capitol Hill. But unlike Capitol Hill, particularly the area west
of Broadway, the top of Queen Anne has been quiet and constant.
Amazingly, there are no construction cranes in this part of town. And
there is little that will shock or surprise a person who happens to
visit the area after a long parting. Had Pb Elemental built Sterling
Residence in the neighborhood that contains the bulk of its major
projects, the Central District, the judges of AIA might have missed it.
The house is not groundbreaking but consistent with the strong ideals
and values of modernism—it’s composed of two primary volumes that
are separated by a core of dark woods and metal fixtures. At the top of
this core, windows all around, windows that can see beyond the hill,
beyond Ballard, beyond the clouds, into the blue—windows that
flood the rooms, the staircase, the concrete floor with light. There is
little more to Sterling Residence than these refined elements.
A week ago, I asked Pb Elemental’s Chris Pardo for the design motive
of Sterling Residence. He saw the street, he saw the surrounding homes:
Was he being provocative? Cruel? Difficult? Honest?
“I think people often make the mistake of confusing context with
character. The character of a neighborhood is set typically when it is
first developed. In Queen Anne’s case, this would be the early 1900s,”
he said. “Craftsman homes on [the] hill were originally designed and
built based on the tools, skills of craftsman, and as a reflection of
the time… Context evolves, Queen Anne has become a very busy
(especially Queen Anne Avenue) urban neighborhood, building
technologies have changed, family dynamics have changed. The Sterling
Residence had to consider what Queen Anne is now, what lifestyle and
technologies exist.”
From this point, “what Queen Anne is now,” we need not make more
steps. We can stop here. Sterling Residence is ultimately urban. It
does not pretend to be in a small town, to be in the middle of the
country, to be about the kind of “family dynamics” that the show
Little House on the Prairie endorsed. Sterling Residence is
about young wealth, the global economy, the technologies of tomorrow.
Sterling Residence is about being where it is: in the middle of a big
city. 
what do you want, a tilt up contractor grade beige house with a giant 3 car garage out front??? Don’t hate on a significant building with actual style.
I grew up on Queen Anne, and the idea that this fits in to the area at all (even as something that fits into a “new” context of neighborhood) is just as stupid as the comment posted by AD on 9-9-08 suggesting that “a giant 3 car garage out front” would be seen as some sort of an improvement by the neighborhood. It’s like a cancer standing alone. The old Love Israel house fit better in the neighborhood than this squared off version of the blob. But then again this is Seattle, and they’ll let anyone build whatever they want (thanks Mayor McCheese) as long as they can throw enough money around. And as for the crack about QA being “white” made by the insulting author of the story, so what? Like everwhere else in Seattle people with money moved in, built as cheap and as big as possible without real oversight (the planning comission here is an unregulated joke in the back pocket of anyone with enough money), sold as high as the “Market” would allow(i.e. the canyoning of Broadway North, Belltown, etc.) without adding substance to the neighborhood. Just ugly facades that usually have to be replaced or repaired in 4-7 years because of how cheap they’re made. But the builders don’t care. They got their money and are gone or protected from dealing with the shoddy construction. The people I knew living there growing up have mostly all moved away because it’s too damn expensive for families to live there too. Loose the families and the community as a living healthy being ends. What’s left? Isolated solo, lonely things. Like that house.
The AIA jury blew it in its praise and the community reaction is overblown. The building is a white box. That’s not style – that’s just not bothering to fill in the blank page. It’s not a risk. It’s lazy. It’s not offensive — it’s boring. It doesn’t break up monotony, it compounds it. It’s not bold and new — it’s a plain white box and that idea has been done to death.
It’s amazing how many people constantly preach about how we should be open minded and accepting of things we may not necessarily agree with or may not understand… until it hits home. Ahh the hypocracy of a supposedly “liberal” city. At least that homes breaks up the sameness/oneness of the street. I’m not saying I would necessarily like a whole street of similar homes, nor am I necessarily saying I find it particularly attractive. But diversity is the unofficial mantra of this city and that home certainly can be considered “diverse” and yet, somehow it’s not welcome (once again, oh the hypocracy). Diversity of architecture is what keeps a street from being boring. It shows that people w/ different tastes or lifestyles CAN coexist and function in a community while still maintaining individuality and personal expression (I don’t really want to go into the argument of whether this particular home is personal expression or not… I’m just trying to say how, in general, a house that sticks out like a sore thumb is usually in some way a statement or reflection of those who live in it). Besides, even if you don’t like it, doesn’t seeing it then help reaffirm the beauty of the rest of the neighborhood? You know how they say one doesn’t realize how good something is until they’ve had a taste of something bad (again, I don’t necessarily think of it as “bad”, just trying to give an example)?