It’s rare that I walk into a public room and find myself enchanted — especially a room that is associated with transportation infrastructure. Though many cities are graced with gorgeous stations from the era of great railroad wealth, and occasionally a decent airport design will transcend commercial mediocrity, America can’t seem to have nice public places in a country where rote civil engineering rules. Which means transport rarely celebrates its role as transition or threshold, nor celebrates arrival and departure.
We are in too much in a hurry or our capital-construction agencies are too afraid of architectural boldness, or too inept or too stingy to build designs that go the extra mile. I realize this windup asks a waiting room recently completed as part of the central waterfront’s Seattle Ferry Terminal to shoulder a lot of cultural baggage.
This single room is deceptively simple. It is high-ceilinged, with a roof that seems to float above the glass walls on three sides, as it extends in broad overhangs that suggest protectiveness and cut the glare of afternoon sun. The room glows as it draws in the typically limpid slate-grey cloudy-day Seattle light. It opens to views across Elliott Bay where restless mists swirl around the Olympic mountains in the distance. To the south are the tall angular cranes of Seattle’s container port.
Slabs of glass that gave the views starring roles would have been obvious and easy. Yet this room, designed, like the rest of the ferry terminal, by the local architecture firm NBBJ, subtly layers details that enhance the room’s character. The cool outdoor light is warmed by the wood-paneled ceiling, which is gently uplit by suspended strip fixtures.
The patterned window-walls comfortingly enclose the space without obscuring the views across the ever-changing cloud and seascape. The small windows open for ventilation, and the structure uses ceiling fans, gentle radiant heating through the floor, and needs no air conditioning — and no obtrusive interruptions of the ceiling plane for ductwork. On sunny afternoons Elliott Bay refracts sunlight onto the ceiling and stripes the polished light brown concrete floor with the patterns of the window-wall mullions. Triangular skylights balance the daylight coming in through the walls so that people are not silhouetted against the brightness coming through so much glass.
Beautiful public rooms are a gift to communities, an aspect of what makes cities memorable. I live in a city where people study amid high-ceilinged grandeur at the New York Public Library’s top-floor Reading Room, but bustle through Grand Central Station, where diagonal beams of sunlight compete with the starry night sky painted on the ceiling. Eero Saarinen designed the impossibly glamorous former TWA terminal at JFK airport, now a hotel lobby.
I like sublime contemporary spaces as well: the World Trade Center Hub by Santiago Calatrava, and the International Terminal, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in San Francisco’s otherwise unremarkable airport, where delicate boat like trusses suspended from the ceiling also draw in light. Great public rooms are much less common in most cities, and the newest most sprawling cities seem to possess few of them.
I go out of my way to walk into a great public room.
Back to the Seattle terminal. The dock just beyond the waiting pavilion feeds some 5 million passengers and vehicles annually. It replaces a particularly mean structure thrown up many decades ago, Coleman Dock, one of the reasons the contrast is so great.
The design of the entire terminal is as thoughtful as the waiting pavilion. Autos own the street level so boarding foot passengers enter through a block-long entry pavilion that runs along Alaskan Way, screening the vehicles and asphalt, but primarily concerned with getting people up to the upper level serving foot passengers. The facade is porous, with narrow vertical perforated metal panels that scrim the human movement within and glow when late afternoon sunlight shines through.
The pavilion introduces a palette of white, grey, and orange painted metal, with ceilings unexpectedly faced in wood. Orange elements denote pedestrian vertical circulation to the vision impaired.
A stair on the northern end pauses in a generous landing to frame long vistas along the Waterfront Park that is coming to completion along 15 blocks lined with wood-framed wharf buildings that once served sea-going ships and now mainly cater to tourists. Already this partially complete promenade (hence the construction fences in the photos) is thronged with people, so the landing is an enviable people-watching spot.
On the passenger level, the metal-paneled facade frames views of downtown blocks stair-stepping steeply uphill and inland.
A half-round cutout in the deck artfully frames waiting vehicles below as it funnels inbound passengers past a ticketing kiosk and into the glass-walled waiting pavilion, and the unexpected horizons it unveils.
In its combination of quiet boldness, reticence when called for, and lack of self-consciousness, the term “masterpiece” does not seem to apply. It’s pretty satisfying though, and worth celebrating because such thoughtfulness is so unusual in transport infrastructure. Cities deserve more such places.
