Bold Choice: Seattle's new Portal to Puget Sound

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.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/11/28/bold-choice-seattles-new-portal-to-puget-sound/?mc_cid=5ab75f61dc&mc_eid=a0c4847065