We hosted a reserved-only-for-us architectural walking tour in downtown Seattle, and one of the “tourists” was chapter member Carol Wanda Spradlin. We asked her to share a little bit with us, and this is what she said:

No, I did not take notes. How could I take notes when I was so busy looking and listening? By not focusing on capturing notes, I was enthralled in some visually-interesting, architecturally-cool info. You can’t experience that by trying to take notes.

So, hands-free (other than snapping pics), I’ll share these visuals with you:

• The terra cotta reliefs on the Cobb Building are NOT Chief Seattle or a compilation of all the tribes here in Washington. The reliefs were ordered out of a catalog from a company back east. The designer (or builder) looked in a catalog and ordered 10 Indian reliefs. The artist who designed the reliefs just put a bit of this with a bit of that and VOILA, Indian Chief (of course now it’s “Native American Chief”). There are 8 reliefs on the building, and one in the concourse between 4th Avenue and the One Union Square building.  You can walk up to it and touch it.  It’s very tall—very, very tall. (Okay, it’s a bit taller than me!) The 10th relief is in the Convention Center (I think).
• I didn’t take any notes because my focus was on looking around at things I hadn’t noticed before. Like: Little streams of water. The south face of a building that has multi-colored aluminum rectangles that are oh so beautiful (the 5^th & Madison Condominiums—very upscale/high end). The side of the “pencil” building that is tiny little tiles . . . and I never noticed that before. I also didn’t know some people refer to the Rainier Tower as the pencil building, because, duh, it looks like a pencil standing on its point.
• In the downtown library, there is one corner just by the door that has five structural beams coming together at one point. It’s very unique.
• Did you know the Seattle Tower building has metal trees on top? From afar, they look like tiny, thin towers. Nope. They are trees. For decoration. And the building has white tiles at the top of each outside level to resemble . . . snow (on top of mountains). How cool is that?

Our Seattle Architecture Foundation tour guide, Garrett Lumens (of CallisonRTKL), was an absolute delight. It was a really interesting tour, and I hope the chapter hosts another one soon!

Thanks for sharing, Carol (and for the photo for this blog post); and thank you, Garrett, for leading the tour!