August 2017 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold this rendering of the proposed 40-story Nexus Tower for downtown Seattle. The home-base city for Bill Gates’ Microsoft colossus is crazy for buildings that look like they’re liable to topple over on you or disorient you — sort of like Bill’s Windows operating system. In fact, Seattle lies on the infamous Cascadia Subduction Zone, the site of one of the most powerful earthquakes in North America ever documented — January 26, 1700, 9.0 on the Richter scale (see this piece from The New Yorker magazine, July 20,2015). That was before the Pacific Northwest was settled by European Americans. Here’s what the article says about a modern replay of such an event:

If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one…. [T]he area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. Fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

So, isn’t this entertaining pile o’cubes just the thing to build there?