Seattle's tallest skyscraper is about to get a much taller neighbor.

New information submitted to the city shows that the skyscraper planned for Fourth Avenue and Columbia Street will be 101 stories tall. — Biz Journals

To promote the new Mad Max video game coming out at the start of September, Uber teamed up with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment this weekend to give fans in Seattle real rides in real Fury Road vehicles.

Through Monday (we know — not enough time, life isn't fair, etc.), those going to and from the city's PAX Prime gaming convention will have the chance to nab a varied set of postapocalyptic chariots that seat either one, three, or four other riders. — Vulture

It soon became apparent that the alley was not a great place to be: Further down the way was a cardboard box used as a makeshift toilet. Once, he saw a pool of blood and the apparent weapon, a pointy umbrella...

Vogel asked an architect friend what he should do. “She said the answer was simple: All I needed to do was put people in it [the alley],” said Vogel. — Yes Magazine

“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers 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. — newyorker.com

There are ways to bring elegance to 5 over 1 structures, but it requires a high degree of skill and commitment. Only a very talented designer can take such a limited palette of materials and make the resulting building interesting, if not elegant. But developers must be willing to hire those skilled designers. Many are simply not interested. [...] Hence, the wildly uneven — and often uninspiring — architecture in Seattle today. — crosscut.com

After past run-ins with the city, the nomadic Nickelsville has shifted from temporary place to temporary place. Most recently, the group struggled with a location, after Seattle decided to authorize and regulate three homeless encampments in the city.

“There’s a need for a transportable, insulated, tiny house that provides privacy and isn’t going to be a huge burden for them when they move,” — nextcity.org

Megaprojects almost always fall short of their promises—costing too much, delivering underwhelming benefits, or both. Yet...cities still fall for them, seduced by new technologies and the lure of the perfect fix. A mix of factors has given Seattle a particularly acute sense of angst. The project depends on a singular piece of engineering. And Bertha’s building a highway for cars in a city where workers overcrowd buses and commuters wrap themselves in waterproof everything to bike in the rain. — Bloomberg

If there’s anything positive to emerge from the current mess, it’s that local advocates like Cary Moon, who warned against building the tunnel in the first place, are commanding attention again. Moon recently took to the pages of the local alt-weekly, the Stranger, to argue that in light of the tunnel project’s spectacular, slow-motion meltdown, the city should explore other options. — streetsblog.org

Ancient Egypt endured plagues of locusts. Seattle has its tunnel, which over the last year has featured a series of setbacks and fiascos that, depending on one’s outlook, can be the setup for a punch line, or an eye-rolling narrative of put-upon endurance.

In the latest blow, project engineers said this week that 30 or more buildings in the historic Pioneer Square area [...] had unexpectedly settled, possibly because of water pumping related to the project. — nytimes.com

Landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson of Seattle-based Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and London's Gustafson Porter recently received the eighth annual Obayashi Prize in Tokyo. Established by the Obayashi Foundation, the prize is awarded to a recipient whose work is in tune with the Foundation's mission of supporting interdisciplinary design research in relation to cities and urbanism. — bustler.net

“Seattle was a better opportunity for me than China right now,” Mr. Wang said. “A lot of Chinese families are planning to move here.” — NYT

“It is amazing to realize you could walk around the site not knowing if there is a body underneath you,” Nelson said. “How do you commemorate that?” — The Seattle Times