On June 20th the Queen Anne Historical Society provided its second modern tour. The Modern Tour started with a presentation by Jeff Murdock. Murdock is currently serving his second term on the City of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board and Architectural Review Committee. Murdock presented the Queen Anne Pool, which was designed by Benjamin McAdoo & Co and completed in 1978. Murdock explained that the “construction of the building was controversial because it required the purchase and removal of ten homes, making it the most expensive Seattle Parks pool at $1.25 million.” The pool was a project in the second phase of McAdoo’s career, and Murdock believes “his influence as an African American architect and activist for social change was significant in national as well as local contexts.” …Continue reading “Looking at Queen Anne’s Modern Sites”
The Queen Anne Modern tour held on June 14, 2014 visited contemporary homes and was brackete by two mid-century jewels, Canlis Restaurant (1947) and the Swedish Club (1961). Both buildings reveal the effort to reinvigorate American design following the hiatus from 1929 (the Great Depression) to 1945 (the end of World War II) during which almost nothing got built. Both are pioneering buildings by important local architects. Neither one belongs to the mid-century modern Roman brick class of homes that pepper our hill. Canlis is a marvelous example of Roland Terry’s Northwest School style, while the Swedish Club designed a decade later by Robert Theriault is evidence of the search by post-war architects for a new vocabulary, even it meant borrowing heavily from the work of Seattle-born star Minoru Yamasaki.