Wac6arts

Powell Street Cable Car Turntable Turnaround Dance

At the end of the Powell Street run, two cable car workers turn the car around while a boombox on the street sets a beat. This video from last night. Beautiful evening walking weather.

Light Rail to SeaTac Airport

The light rail ingress and egress for SeaTac airport does not feature any architectural marvel, but it functions like a dream. Frankly, it's a relief the infrastructure is not overbuilt or gussied up with with vaulting this, that or the other.

Walking from the train platform, you take a bridge to what looks like the parking garage, a strip of which has been repurposed as a corridor to the main terminal. Works great. Feels the right sort of permanent for the 21st Century. No glamour, no nonsense. Love it.

Light Show at Site for Future Capitol Hill Sound Transit Light Rail Station

MI6 and I walked north on Broadway last night and came across an art installation behind the chain link fence at the corner of East Denny. This is part of the construction site for the future Sound Transit light rail station for Capitol Hill.

Thanks to a post on the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, I learned that the field is the work of Don Corson, and that the installation has been sponsored by Sound Transit.

Apparently, the rods are made of fiberglass. In an interview within a brief, smartly edited video by David Albright, Corson explains that the manufacturer of the rods mistakenly shipped 4-foot-long rods, whereas the piece, called "Oscillating Fields," was designed to have 8-foot-long rods. But the show is going on with the rods in place, in time for Halloween.

The Beacon Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library

Public transit is a gift. Yesterday, MI6 and I headed out from Westlake Center in Seattle on the new light rail, just to explore, and along the way stopped at the Beacon Hill station. A block south of the station, we found the Beacon Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library.

We went in around 4 pm - this was on a Sunday afternoon, mind you - and the place was packed.

The building is impressive and hospitable. Somehow the work spaces under the vaulting roof seem proportioned for small groups, even though the floor plan is what you would have to call "open." The only things approximating interior walls, really, are the book shelves, and those seem scaled back as well. The exterior walls of the building, though, give allowance for compartmentalized meeting rooms and lounging spaces.

Though you can't help looking up. Maybe it's because we were there on a Sunday and I grew up attending churches, but I felt that the place combined the sacred and the civic.

The exterior features kinetic sculptures by Miles Pepper, including a boat above the main entrance and, along the west side of the building, a "rain scupper" that has a Native Northwest Art feel.

I thought the "rain scupper" was a fanciful decorative element, meant simply to evoke the beak of a bird; but the library's website explains that the beak is functional. Go the the library's site to see pictures of the rain scupper dispensing water.