College of Built Environments at the University of Washington.
The house on Queen Anne Avenue: It's modern. It's award winning. It's hated by its neighbors.
Monday March 2008"I should get a permit from the city and show movies on there this summer," says Jennifer Geist, neighbor to the owners of Sterling Residence on Queen Anne Avenue, of the stark, three-story, windowless wall of the back of the house that actually faces the street. This home was designed by Pb Elemental, a firm conceived in 2004 by two of CAUP's former students, Chris Pardo and David Biddle. In just four years, Pb Elemental has grown from 2 to 50 employees - all on the merit of local projects - and part of the success of the firm has been attributed to its "unification of architecture (or style) with town houses." What this particular home expresses is a shaking up of the old guard, a "disturbance of power, aesthetics, codes, modes, values, and ideas that are plugged into a wider war for the soul/identity of this city." It stands in blatant opposition to the bungalows and turn of the century homes that typically identify this neighborhood, though it is not the first modern home to be built here. While the other modern homes may have caused a bit of a buzz in the community, "Sterling Residence has caused a break."
Neighbor's opinions of the home vary, some calling it an abortion clinic, some are shocked, stunned, while some find the building offensive. Others say that it has no sense of community, and while these neighbors would like for the city to hate it too, the opposite appears to be happening. As the building speaks to a discourse that other Queen Anne Avenue residences have little ear for - the discourse of modernism, post-industrial technologies, and urban theory for example - it has been winning awards, and being recognized as innovative, even "a breath of fresh air." Sterling Residence won an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2007 because it breaks from the monotony of the street, and presents a fresh, new vision for the neighborhood. When the AIA jury visited some 140 projects in Seattle they were not impressed, according to Lawrence Cheek, architecture review writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 25, 2007. "For a city with such strengths - education, culture, natural environment, wealth - [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. " Indeed, Sterling Residencce was chosen for the award precisely because of the impact it has made in the context of the neighborhood in which it dwells, abortion clinic-esque or not.
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