Ugh, I love this angle.
Ugh, I love this angle. JK
The past few weeks, I've spotted many sexy stickers of modern architecture around Seattle. I wrote about two of the stickers a few weeks ago, but since then I've spotted SIX more. Mostly in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I get excited when I spot one. It feels special.

All of these modern (and often Brutalist) buildings cleverly think about how to solve problems of the present without sacrificing arresting, interesting forms. Concrete transformed from a dull material into something really resplendent. It's a welcome change from the glass towers being built downtown. Whoever is posting these around the city, my hat's off to you.

Avala TV Tower near Belgrade, Serbia (above)
Designed by architects Uglješa Bogunović and Slobodan Janjić, and engineer Milan Krstić, The Avala TV Tower was completed in 1965 to be used as a telecommunication tower. The original building stood at ~202m tall and was perched on a tripod. That original building, however, was totally destroyed in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War in order to kill Radio Television Serbia for the remainder of the war (it didn't work). The one that stands nows is roughly 2m taller than the original and reopened in 2010.

The Villa Savoye in Poissy, France

Le Corbusier, come through!
Le Corbusier, come through! Jasmyne Keimig
This building is perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch. It was designed by Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jenneret, as a country home for Pierre and Eugénie Savoye. The villa is held up as an important example of both Corbusier's work and of modernist architecture more generally. Composed of reinforced concrete, the villa represents his Five Points of architecture, features he believed necessary for a modernist building: a pilotis that lift the building up above the ground, a flat roof that could serve as a garden and terrace, open-plan interiors, ribbon windows for light and ventilation, and a free facade independent of the load-bearing structure.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum in Tokyo

This sort of reminds me of the AT-AT Walker from Star Wars.
This sort of reminds me of the AT-AT Walker from Star Wars. JK
The Edo-Tokyo Museum, which opened in 1993, has: a life-size replica of an old bridge, historical model towns and buildings built to scale, a theater, rotating exhibitions, restaurants, and shopping. The museum was designed by Kiyonori Kikutake who was a founding member of Metabolism, a Japanese architectural movement that emerged after World War II that sought to unify architectural sculptures with organic biological growth. The concrete exterior of this building, however, is based on traditional rice storehouses and is symbolically the same height as the Edo Castle.

Prentice Women's Hospital and Maternity Center in Chicago

Would love to go to my gyno here.
Would love to go to my gyno here. JK
This is a picture of ghost. The building was sadly demolished in 2014 after a flurry of historic preservation attempts. Northwestern University—who owned the site—decided that a new medical center was more necessary than the Brutalist building. Designed by architect Bertrand Goldberg (the brain behind Marina City) in 1971 and opened in 1975, the concrete quatrefoil tower was constructed to minimize the distance between nurse and patient. Used as a maternity center, the patients were housed in the outer four lobes while the nurses operated from the middle section. It also made construction history, apparently, in its use of early computer-aided design techniques.


Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban or National Parliament House in Dhaka, Bangladesh

This picture doesn't really do the building justice.
This picture doesn't really do the building justice. JK

Designed by American architect Louis Kahn, the National Parliament House in Dhaka, Bangladesh is a stunning building. Construction took over 20 years to complete from 1961 to 1983, nine years after Kahn died, due to the Bengali war for liberation from Pakistan. You can kind of see in the sticker that the building is surrounded by a man-made moat, giving it an appearance of floating on water. Composed of eight voluminous structures around the main assembly hall, the National Parliament House is made of concrete with inlaid white marble, which protects the building from the extreme Bengali desert heat. And the shapes on the side allow for natural light to come into the interior without the need for windows. Please look at more pictures of this building because it's a wonder.

City of Keizer Chemawa Station Tank in Keizer, Oregon

If I had torn off the
If I had torn off the "you are beautiful" sticker, it would have ruined the other sticker. Decidedly NOT beautiful :( JK
I had some difficultly identifying this building because of that damn sticker on the front. Thanks to The Stranger's Tech-Savvy/At-Risk Youth Grant Hendrix, I learned it's a water tower in Keizer, Oregon, a town in the Willamette Valley. Information is scant and it appears to be the only non-modernist building on this list. It looks cool, though.