Rudi, I am quite sure that all you have to do is sign up for the NY Times online, free of charge. At any rate, here's the article:
He's Turning Seattle Into His Kind of Town
Microsoft Billionaire Alters Landscape
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
EATTLE, May 16 -- No,
notwithstanding a joke
making the rounds here,
Seattle has not changed its
name to Allentown. Not yet,
anyway.
But from one end of downtown
to the other, from a
fantastically curvy and
psychedelic rock 'n' roll
museum, designed by Frank O.
Gehry and opening next month
at the base of the Space
Needle, to the recent implosion
of the Kingdome and plans for
its replacement with a $450
million outdoor football stadium,
the landscape of Seattle is
undergoing a remarkable
transformation bankrolled
largely by one man.
He is Paul G. Allen, who
bounces around from being the
second- to the fourth-richest
person on the planet, depending
on the fortunes of the stock of
the Microsoft Corporation,
which he co-founded 25 years
ago with a middle-school chum,
William H. Gates.
While Mr. Gates continues to
do battle from the company's
helm against software competitors (and federal antitrust lawyers), Mr.
Allen, who resigned from Microsoft management in 1983, has a far more
diversified palette of activities. And many combine longtime passions of his
-- sports, movies, futuristic designs and the music of Jimi Hendrix, the late
guitarist and Seattle native whom Mr. Allen has enshrined in an entire
gallery at the new museum -- with real estate projects that are remaking
the face of the city.
Seattle of course abounds these days with cyberbillionaires who are
making a huge imprint on the virtual world and, to a lesser extent, on the
real world of their hometown.
But none of the others come close to affecting the visual appearance of
Seattle in the same way as the 47-year-old Mr. Allen, whose net worth is
currently around $30 billion, who owns the Seattle Seahawks of the
National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National
Basketball Association, who has major investments in more than 100 "new
media" companies and who even plays rhythm guitar in a Seattle band,
Grown Men, that recently released its first CD and, on its Web site,
describes its music as being inspired by Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty
and the Eagles.
Mr. Allen's real estate projects are so eclectic and so broadly spread
around the city that Jeffrey K. Ochsner, chairman of the department of
architecture at the University of Washington, describes him as "kind of a
modern equivalent to the Medici in Florence," a man who is building a
coliseum as well as a new techno-palace of glass-walled headquarters in
south downtown. Others here compare him to Baron Haussmann, the
creator of modern Paris.
Intriguingly, though, Mr. Allen seems to have generated less controversy
than a bit of civic head-scratching as to whether his projects all add up to a
grand plan.
"As far as having an 800-pound gorilla running around your city, he's a
pretty amiable one," said Alex Steffen, president of Allied Arts of Seattle,
an urban planning and arts advocacy group. "I mean, it's hard to be too
outraged by someone who just loves sports and is kind of geeky in his
devotion to Jimi Hendrix.
"But at the same time, you look at somebody with that much sheer power,
that much of an awesome ability to shape the landscape of the city you live
in, and you want something a bit more visionary. I don't have any sense
that he's looking at a map of the city and saying, 'What can I do to make
Seattle a better place?' I get the sense that he's got all these holdings and
all this money, and he's looking at the map and saying, 'What could I do
there that would be a lot of fun?' "
Naturally, Mr. Allen said in an interview, he wants to make Seattle a better
place.
But he seemed to bristle at the notion that he should have an overarching
design vision.
"There are threads that run through these things, but there's no singular
master plan," he said. "There's the desire to be fresh, to incorporate high
technology, to do things in high-quality ways.
What we're doing downtown kind of reflects the breadth of my interests in
all these different areas, all the way from music to sports to high tech to
movies and so forth."
But even if Mr. Allen's central aim were only to find ways to make the city
more fun, many people here say, that would be a great idea.
The new music museum, the Experience Music Project, known as E.M.P.,
is undeniably fun on the inside: an interactive paean to modern American
music, including rock, jazz, soul, gospel, country, blues, grunge, hip-hop and
other forms to come. Sound studios allow visitors to play their own music,
or to strum a guitar that lights the sequence of chords to play "Louie
Louie," a song whose lyrics led to an F.B.I. investigative file that is one of
80,000 artifacts collected for the museum.
Outside is another matter. "Make it swoopy" were the instructions Mr.
Allen offered when he hired Mr. Gehry as architect for the project. The
$250 million museum has an undulating aluminum and stainless-steel shell
of gold, silver, red, blue and iridescent purple, with wires stretched across
the top, all intended to evoke the image of a smashed guitar. The Seattle
Center monorail runs right through it.
E.M.P., set to open on June 23, is a powerful sight that attracts the eye
from all kinds of Seattle vantage points, and it has quickly become the most
talked-about work of architecture in town. It has its proponents, including
some who believe it represents a bit of Bilbao on Elliott Bay, harking back
to Mr. Gehry's much-celebrated Guggenheim Museum in that Spanish city.
But it has its share of detractors, too. "Open-heart surgery gone awry" was
among the less than flattering images summoned up in a survey several
months ago by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which found sentiment
running about 3 to 1 against the design.
Mr. Gehry himself, in town this week for a sold-out appearance at the
Seattle Arts and Lectures speakers' series, seemed amused by all the talk
about his new building.
"I have an unusual client," the 71-year-old architect explained during a
walking tour of the museum's exterior on Monday. Mr. Allen, he said,
"really asked me to push it -- to take it to the moon, so to speak."
Mr. Allen, for his part, said he was thrilled. "It's kind of rock 'n' roll
architecture," he said.
"It's expressive and unabashed and fresh and exciting. You're not going to
see too many 120-foot-high purple metallic structures. You're just not.
Even if you don't appreciate the particular design, you have to appreciate
the exuberance and the audacity and all that. To me, it's breathtaking."
Fans of the museum say it will in time become a Seattle landmark, perhaps
even an internationally recognizable symbol of the city like the Space
Needle, which was built for the 1962 World's Fair. Others say that's a
stretch.
"Look at the difference between what those two monuments say," said Mr.
Steffen, of Allied Arts. "The Space Needle says World's Fair, an ambitious
society yearning for this amazing future, when energy would be too cheap
to meter and we'd all be flying around in rocket cars.
"What will this museum say? It'll say, yeah, we once had a guy who picked
a wacky architect and really liked Jimi Hendrix. It's not even in the same
league, though I suppose it may eventually be seen as a reflection of an era
when money was too cheap to meter."
Mr. Allen's influence is certainly felt elsewhere as well. One project, 505
Union Station, is a striking new 11-story building, designed with a
cascading "glass waterfall," that will anchor more than a million square feet
of office, retail and hotel space in several buildings nearby. The project will
provide headquarters for Vulcan Northwest Inc., the umbrella company
that oversees many of Mr. Allen's endeavors and is currently based in
Bellevue, across Lake Washington.
In addition, the project will involve renovation of the 90-year-old Union
Station, which will be used as a transportation hub for Sound Transit, the
public agency that is trying to knit together a commuter-rail, light-rail and
express-bus system of nearly $4 billion to ease the region's chronic traffic
problems.
Mr. Allen also bought and renovated, in an early-60's retro style, the
827-seat Cinerama Theater, which he loved attending as a boy. He
donated $10 million to the University of Washington for a library building
named for his late father, Kenneth, who was the university's associate
librarian. On the other side of the state, he even built a $3.1 million,
ultrawired house for the fraternity he belonged to at Washington State
University.
Mr. Allen dropped out of Washington State as a young man and went to
live for a while in Boston, where he met up with a younger friend from
Lakeside School here, Mr. Gates, who soon dropped out of Harvard. They
founded Microsoft in 1975.
In 1982, while still at Microsoft, Mr. Allen discovered lumps in his neck
and was found to have Hodgkin's disease. He fought off the illness with
months of radiation therapy and eventually left Microsoft, though he has
remained friendly with Mr. Gates through the years and sits on the
company's board.
He owns about 215 million shares in Microsoft, roughly 4.1 percent of the
company's stock outstanding, Vulcan Northwest officials say.
Mr. Allen did not say whether he had any other major projects to
announce, but his spokeswoman, Susan Pierson Brown, said that all his
building ventures met some basic criteria.
"Each one is appropriate for its purpose, for its subject matter and for its
neighborhood: we wouldn't put a Frank Gehry building out near Costco in
Issaquah," she said of the big store in the Seattle suburbs, "and we wouldn't
put a rock 'n' roll museum in a square box." |
