Seattle Reboots Its Future

Back to the Future

Housed in a beige International Style building in the shadow of the University of Washington's football stadium, Seattle's Museum of History & Industry is not the kind of place you would stumble across. It's on the outskirts of the city. Cramped spaces and low ceilings make it difficult to display large objects, such as the first commercial airplane that Bill Boeing produced, the city's first neon sign, or a sleek hydroplane that made high-speed boat races popular on Lake Washington in the 1950s.

It's hard to tell stories about the city's history in such small quarters, explains Leonard Garfield, 47, executive director of the museum, known as MOHAI to Seattleites. It's even harder, given the out-of-the-way location, to make history seem relevant to the city.

That will change in a few years, when MOHAI opens in its new home, now being built as part of an expansion of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Wearing a white hard hat and standing just inside the entrance amidst hydraulic scissor lifts and wood pallets, Garfield points out the pluses of the new location. One block over is the new home of A Contemporary Theatre. The Paramount Theatre, whose renovation was funded almost entirely by Ida Cole, a former Microsoft executive, is nearby.

If the old museum felt like a warehouse jammed full of artifacts, Garfield wants the new museum to be like a Web portal, with links to information about the past, present, and future of the city and strong connections to the region's other museums. "We have the first commercial plane that Boeing ever made and lots of materials about the impact of Asian immigration, but if you want to know the whole story of aviation in the area, or to really understand Asian culture, we'll hook you up with the Museum of Flight or the Wing Luke Asian Museum," Garfield says. "We're thinking about a bus or trolley route that would take you to those places. The idea is to reinforce the smaller, local neighborhood museums and cultural centers."

Inside the new MOHAI, Garfield plans to celebrate many of the business innovations that came from Seattle, including the near-obsessive customer-service ideology that the Nordstrom family introduced to American retail. The museum's collection includes some of the earliest outdoor gear manufactured by Eddie Bauer, which Garfield wants to showcase, along with merchandise from Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), in an exhibit about the tension between the Northwest's passion for the outdoors and extractive industries such as timber and salmon fishing. He's exploring a deal with a large international coffee chain to turn the museum's coffee shop into "an exhibit in itself about the coffee culture that was born in Seattle."

"Seattle is a city that has always been about the future," Garfield says. "People come here to reinvent themselves, to start a new enterprise. Jeff Bezos came here to start Amazon. The result is that we don't attract people who are interested in the past. Now we're at a turning point, and it's important to look at how we got here and to look for clues about where we're going."

A Building Dedicated to the Book

One day in late 1997, Deborah Jacobs stood atop the Olympic Parking Garage in downtown Seattle, surveyed the landscape, and decided that "there's no place like home." For several years, Seattle Public Library (SPL) administrators, city officials, and citizens had been sparring over the location of a new central library that would replace the existing building -- a structure built in the late 1950s that looks like a transplanted Bulgarian Agricultural Ministry. Jacobs, the city librarian, had taken the job only a few months earlier. She had been to visit all of the proposed sites for the new library. Conventional wisdom said that it didn't make sense to build a new library on the site of the old one, because that would require the library to relocate twice -- once to a temporary location and then again to the new building.

Jacobs concluded that moving twice wasn't out of the question if it allowed the SPL to stay in a location that was an easy walk or bus ride from most neighborhoods, where Seattleites were accustomed to finding it. (Seattle residents are some of the most avid library users in the country: Eighty percent have library cards.) "There's no place like home" became an internal rallying cry.

Once Jacobs and her colleagues decided where the library would be, the next question they confronted was who would design it. They selected Rem Koolhaas, a boundary-breaking Dutch architect whose firm, the Office for Modern Architecture (OMA), has not yet done many buildings in the United States. His design for the new library is angular and jagged -- much like a hastily assembled stack of books. Several facets of the glass exterior reveal crisscrossing structural trusses, and parts of the outside are sheathed in copper. When completed in 2003, the 355,000-square-foot building will have 11 floors and an underground parking garage, and will cost $159 million. Jacobs has managed to avoid having the citizenry reject an engaging design by a non-Seattle-based architect by making the process as transparent as possible and by practicing what she calls "open-hearted listening."