Tall Buildings

Warning lights burn and blink red. Buildings, cranes, and high tension wires scream “we are here, don’t run into us!” The lights blink back their own color of red, warning light red. A color you might not find in a Crayon box. A color you most certainly will find blinking back at you from all cities, Seattle to Tokyo.

Buildings propped up by steel thrust themselves 50, 60, 76 stories into the sky. And then I, gliding by on bike through the cool evening, think about why we call them stories. Do they have memories of the men that built them? Does each of the 76 floors that make up the Bank of America tower have something to say? What stories do glass, fluorescents, cubicles, and steel have to tell?

The late Victor Steinbrueck, former dean of the University of Washington School of Architecture, had this to say about the Bank of America building in Seattle: "It's terrible. A flat-out symbol of greed and egoism. It's probably the most obscen erection of ego edifice on the Pacific Coast".

I couldn’t have said it better myself.