I wrote this in The Stranger nearly 20 years ago: “…Seattle has three buildings by famous contemporary architects: Seattle Art Museum (Robert Venturi), Experience Music Project (Frank Gehry), and Seattle Central Library (Rem Koolhaas). In 2011, this small list will be increased by one with the completion of a skyscraper at 601 Fourth Avenue… [Its architect] Norman Foster.” The building did not materialize. Nor did the one that was planned during the second half of the Amazon-fueled construction boom, which transformed Seattle’s skyline.  First conceived in 2017 as a 58-story condominium with a public plaza, the project, managed by Vancouver, BC’s, Bose Development, was supposed to be completed this year. But financial difficulties attributed to the 2020 lockdown and consequent rising construction costs have so far left 601 Fourth Avenue with only the ghost of a luxury tower filling the dreaded pit created in 2005, when Seattle’s Public Safety Building was demolished.   I called Bose Development’s Seattle office to get up on things, but the line was rudely dead (I rarely encounter dead phone numbers). I emailed the main office and… dead silence. I examined the public records concerning the property and found that construction activity, which began modestly in 2019, finally croaked, after much sputtering, in 2023. Since then, there have been only reports of garbage bags left on the property (2025), or breaches of the wooden wall that surrounds the hole (2025), or people spotted in the bottom of a pit that now has the appearance of the land before time (2026). As for the value of the property, it suffered a terrific collapse this year. In 2025, King County Department of Assessments placed its total taxable value at $85,680,000. Its value is now $34,272,000. It has not been that low since 1991.  What one will not find wanting in this city’s conventional media are expressions of existential anxiety about this “pit from hell.” In  January, the Seattle Times editorial board described, with trademark crankiness, “The block north of the King County Courthouse is currently a dead zone,” and demanded that city officials relax regulations to make it easier for someone, any fool with money, to “bring [this] city block back to life.” Credit: Charles Mudede But we are in a recession. The construction boom is in the past, and because the present and astonishingly incompetent president still has two more years in office, we can only expect the economy to continue to slide into what increasingly looks like a depression. And even if Trump is removed from the White House in 2028—and, sadly, even this, from the perspective of the present moment, is not a certainty—it will take at least another two years to revive what the 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes famously called the “animal spirits” of market-rate developers. So, what’s to be done? I propose we leave the pit as wild as it is, but place at its center something tourists will ogle and philosophers approve of. But what does a philosopher have to do with all of this downtown business? For an answer, we must turn to the words of Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery: “The philosopher… does not face an organized structure, but rather something resembling a heap of ruins.” Popper almost had it right, but he made a mistake that is surprisingly common among post-Aristotelian philosophers (including one of the founders of the Scottish Enlightenment, Lord Kames).  Yes, the philosopher’s home is the ruins. For a pre-modern philosopher, these ruins are in the past; for a modern one, they are in the future. What separates one type of philosopher from the other is the Enlightenment, which initiated the modern age and its faith in progress 400 years ago. The key feature of modernity, as the British historian David Wootton explains in his masterful The Invention of Science, is its devotion to the future. Wootton even points out that Shakespeare and the pre-Enlightenment age in general lived in what we moderns see and identify as the past. Indeed, the past was so present to the poet that, in a strict sense, it didn’t exist. Wootton writes: “Shakespeare, perfectly sensibly, imagined ancient Rome as just like contemporary London but with sunshine and togas.” The ruins of the modern philosopher are not way back then, or right now, but are to come.   Another clarification is needed. The future the mind of modernity visits and examines is not one with better spaceships, or cars that finally levitate, or long-domesticated Jetsons maids. No, it visits the ruins of a totally spent, exhausted, collapsed future.  The Last of Us is very close to the home of a modern philosopher. The characters’ decrepit crib and the decaying world they roam are, in the words of the trip-hop genius Tricky, in “the aftermath.” Now, back to the unrepentant pit in downtown Seattle.  Imagine this concept, which owes its origin to a recent and superb work by the local artist Daniel Smith called Slapstick Indians: The city first constructs, with durable materials, an exact and considerable model of downtown Seattle in the heart of the pit and leaves it there to just decay, leaves it to the forces of the elements and non-human life. The city then sets, at the sidewalk level, structural glass around the pit. What will the public see over the years? The after-future of Seattle. Now that would be wonderful. The city watches what it will certainly become in the land after these modern times. The creepers climbing the Columbia Center. I-5 absorbed by bushes. Moss thriving on the top of the Space Needle. Trees growing out of Amazon’s Spheres. Once in a while, a structure crumbles before our eyes. Tourists would love to see this sort of thing. The city as a philosopher.  See the pit—and Daniel Smith’s virtual artwork—during the Augmented Reality Walking Tour: Future Arts Way on Sunday, Aug 9. The post Seattle Should Build a Model of Itself in The Pit and Let It Decay appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less