The tunnel’s transformation is part of a wider proposal to create a new greenbelt for the city’s downtown that would connect its parks and waterfront.
The Miller Hull Partnership has proposed removing the roof of Seattle’s defunct Battery Street Tunnel, converting it into a landscaped ravine. The proposal would see the tunnel’s structural beams salvaged and used to support elevated pedestrian walkways. Courtesy The Miller Hull Partnership During the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for prominent architects to put forth bold visions for the future of cities. Frank Lloyd Wright presented his initial ideas for Broadacre City in 1932 and continued refining them until his death in 1959. During the postwar era, Buckminster Fuller proposed enclosing part of Manhattan under a geodesic dome, and Paul Rudolph famously proposed a Brutalist megastructure over the Lower Manhattan Expressway, still a glimmer in Robert Moses’s eye at that time. Perhaps chastened by the reactions to such grandiose schemes, the architecture profession from the 1980s onward took a more conservative tack, generally preferring to pour its most ambitious efforts into corporate projects. At the same time, the automobile-oriented orthodoxy of postwar American urban planning began to be seriously questioned. Infrastructure that seemed visionary […]
