Well, damn. I wanted to write about this with something more definitive to say, but I should learn better. (Fast is good, fast is good, fast is good. Yes. Race of Internet.) Basically, the campus at the Pacific Science Center—the one including the neo-gothic white arches—is officially in jeopardy. The national Cultural Landscape Foundation late last month put the Seattle site on its list of potentially threatened "Marvels of Modernism" around the country.

Also on the list is the Herbert Bayer earthwork in Kent—but there, Kent itself nominated the earthwork for the listing. In other words, Kent's on top of it. Seattle? Not so much.

On Crosscut today comes a story about the potential changes, which are as yet pretty unclear.

Seattle Center, in planning for its future, has said repeatedly that the arches themselves will not be compromised—but the area around them is up in the air.

I haven't studied that area (yet). But I can say that the science center campus feels different from the rest of the center, feels like another zone, a little unreal. (Know what I mean?)

I'll also say that those weird white arches are maybe the most underappreciated architectural feature of Seattle. They are the remaining ghosts of Minoru Yamasaki's doomed modernism—the best testimony to a national tale that spans from the World's Fair in Seattle (where he produced the arches) to a modernist housing project in St. Louis so flawed that it created a dystopia instead of the intended utopia and had to be torn down, all the way to his Twin Towers, which, incidentally, he was commissioned to do when the Port of Authority caught wind of how good his Seattle campus was.

As Crosscut says, we should probably prepare for a fight.

Here's a terrific panorama collage of the campus (I love the deadness of the weather in it) by Christopher Rauschenberg (courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation).