If three hours is too much for you, you can peruse the PowerPoint here, although the slides are professional enough to be hard to follow by themselves.
The City of Seattle will announce the lead designer this morning at 11:00.
Update 11:40: Via SDOT’s Twitter feed “We are pleased to announce James Corner Field Operations as the lead designer for Seattle’s Central Waterfront. ” Their presentation here.
If I recall correctly, the design aspect is something like 29 mil. That’s quite a little prize for the winning team.
Let’s see, the city decides who they like most…. where the roadway will go and what it looks like when done, the wharfs are pretty much ‘what you see is what to got’, and the remaining 9 acres of park are up for grabs.
OK, how about some walkways, grass, trees, shrubs, benches, art, and a couple of fountains.
That will be 29 million please!
Thanks, Seattle.
I didn’t see any PowerPoints at the link.
Oh never mind – click the pictures – the ppts are linked there.
Are any of these ideas really worth billions of dollars?
No :) I can’t say I’m a fan of any of them, but I don’t think anyone here has the capital or time to actually design something worthwhile so this is what we we’re left to choose from. And by we, I really mean the City of Seattle.
I was just looking through the slides and noticed two from Stockholm in the FINAL 1700 NO VIDEO version. Their render of a replacement for slussen on slide 80 involves the relocation of part of old town and Götgatan, a major street on Södermalm. Ha!
What I’m kind of disappointed about though is that after downloading about 450MB of power point presentations I’m still almost just as unsure about what they’re actually proposing now as before. It seems like it’s all just happy children, shades of green, and the promise of public spaces packed with people every day.
In their utopia, that’s how they envision it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people using the park 24/7, 365 days of the year. Much like the rest of our parks here in Seattle because that’s very realistic.
I’d rather see these guys take some of the gaping holes and flat parking lots and change them into a green park and build up the water front. This would alleviate the concern of “There’s not enough green space for me to eat lunch during the work day downtown” argument, but also provide the opportunity for some developer to add stores, restaurants/bars, other attractions and housing at the waterfront – and all of this can be done with a smaller waterfront park, too that allows hand launched watercraft, too!
These are not actual solutions for the waterfront. If you paid attention it was just the teams sharing their philosophy on how they would approach it and what they have done in other cases.
My brain hurts after viewing the winning PowerPoint. What did this actually show? A bunch of random, scattered thoughts. Pipe dreams. Oh, and don’t forget we’re SEATTLE!! Why else throw in the random Nirvana slide?
I want to create a slideshow of my own now. I bet I can get SeaDOT to reconsider with my fantastical ideas!
How about some of “Muscatel Meadows” and Steinbrueck Park.
watch the video.
I amazed me that someone at the City of Seattle doesn’t break the 3 hour video up into 4 distinct presentations…
Its kind of disappointing that a powerpoint made up mainly of stock images of the skyline of your own city and a random rock band can get someone millions of dollars in contracts.
But JCFO did some outstanding work on the High Line Park, so I am slightly more hopeful this afternoon then I was this morning.
And then I remember this Seattle we are talking about, so any final design will have any orginality and daring pumped out of it and it will be build bare bones.
From comments I have seen I think you needed to see the presentation to understand the slides. They were specifically told not to present designs.
Okay yeah. I watched all the presentations and you really have to watch them to understand. They are actually good presentations, because they assist in telling a story, not distracting from what the speaker is actually trying to communicate.