Catherine Barrett
Competitions
NIAUSI (Northwest Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) Fellowship 1988
My proposal (awarded) was to live in Rome for three months and study the urban axes and portals created by Pope Sixtus V in order to better understand how Seattle might take advantage of its own "bent grid" to orient people moving through town.
Blueprint: for Architecture Seattle Waterfront Competition
(Honorable Mention)
Design emphasizing the x and y axes of Seattle and based on the ideas of Christopher Alexander
Blueprint: for Architecture Seattle Art Museum Competition
(Honorable Mention)
The museum in the city ought to be a wild form on a grid. The Seattle grid is our framework, the wild form our culture, the critical life force. Museums preserve cultures frozen in time; they are not culture. They are a distancing machine. Even as they hope to hold the future it is a display in rarified air. No one is touched. It is all speculation.
This museum is a shell of its former self. It contains culture only partially; there are leaks. Some cultures are held tight-fisted in various lockers and other cultures live in the shell.