Is Bellevue The New Vancouver?

By Knute Berger, Crosscut

May 1, 2013

For decades, people have wondered what Bellevue would be when it grew up. Would it simply be an affluent “Greater Seattle” neighborhood? A Twin City, a suburban St. Paul to Seattle’s Minneapolis? Would it be the Anaheim of an Eastside Orange County? The San Jose of the Silicon Forest? In the ’90s, it was identified as part of a new entity, the Edge City, where under-the-radar urbanization was shaping a new kind of suburban economic powerhouse. As skyscrapers rose across Lake Washington, they raised vague questions in the minds of Seattleites about the upstart of Pugetopolis: What’s happening over there? More …

Bulldozing Great Architecture in The Name of Housing Great Art

By Lisa Rochon, Globe and Mail

April 26, 2013

Power and greed may be at the root of why New York’s Museum of Modern Art is expanding its cultural conquest along West 53rd Street, demolishing, and delivering into the maw of its glassy gallery mall, the apparently offensive opaque jewel of architecture where the American Folk Art Museum bravely lived for a decade until 2011. Bulldozing or abandoning the exquisite architectural difference that makes a city unique. That’s how low some big public art institutions – including, most recently, the Vancouver Art Gallery – have sunk. More …