Clair Enlow

Clair Enlow is a freelance journalist writing about architecture, planning and history. She’s a Loeb Fellow and an honorary member of AIASeattle.

Stephen Holl Talks Architecture Friday @Seattle Public Library

He will discuss a theoretical text Questions of Perception he authored with Alberto Perez-Gomez and Juanita Pallasma in 1994. 

Seattle Waterfront Update and Working on Reviving Downtown Streets

Downtown sidewalks coming back to pedestrian life will never be the same. On some parts of the Pike-Pine corridor, they’ll be widened and paved and planted better, according to city plans for the waterfront park and its extensions eastward into the city’s downtown.

Key to the Pledge: Seattle’s Billion-Dollar Arena Makeover has Bold Ambitions

The upgrade has turned KeyArena in Seattle Center into a showcase of green technology and digital wizardry.

A New Downtown Elementary School?

Some Belltown activists want the former tunnel entrance to be a park, not a school or a park-cum-school. But at last the city-schools negotiators finally have a specific site and the outline of a deal.

Gift of the Pandemic: Return of Beavers and Other Shy Wildlife

You don’t have to live in the suburbs to spot native beavers building dams and raising kits inside the city. There are sightings along creeks and trailways in large parks, and this is the best time of the year to spot mothers and their young.

At Long Last, Sea-Tac’s updated North Terminal Emerges

The structural bones are still there, but the terminal has been opened up and modernized by popping the ceiling way up so the original structure is now a low-lying frame.

Refreshing an Iconic Seattle Park in a New Context

It may not be great functional design. It might not even make sense in the new context in which the park sits. But physical spaces are also places of history, and of memory. Sometimes they also get a voice.

Master of Illusion: Seattle’s New Electrical Substation goes Online

The result is ingenious and well worth the mounting list of design awards and breathless reviews. The NBBJ design team, headed by principal Jose Sama, needed to wall off the substation while offering up favors—all within a single project budget.

A Remade Pacific Place: Mall for a Market that stayed Home

The future of Pacific Place seems less certain, and more tied to the fate of overbuilt retail. Might there be some other ways to rejuvenate the building? Empty Pacific Place might be the perfect place to ease Seattle’s transition into the post-pandemic age—and help to save downtown Seattle once again.

Novelist Jess Walter Sets a Story in Early Spokane, Beset With Radicals

Labor is a theme, but Spokane doesn’t really have a labor force—just rootless workers who can’t drive a fair deal. Then the Wobblies come to town.

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