Published as a full color hardback by Penguin Random House in 2018, Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas explores the mercurial nature of place through the lens of one of the fastest growing cities in America using both experiential and data-driven cartography. This tome offers data visualizations, subversive cartography, and narratives that wrestle with the cultural, social, geographical, and geological contexts of Seattle. The book currently has a near perfect 5 star Amazon rating. It was reviewed lovingly in The Stranger and received high praise from Ken Jennings—the highest earning contestant and now host of Jeopardy!.
The first print run of 15,000 books sold out. The second paperback print run was released Fall 2022. A limited edition of signed archival prints will be released Spring 2023.
Co-authored with fellow architecture comrades Jenny Kempson and Natalie Ross.
Client
Penguin Random House
Role
Author, Co-Designer, Researcher, Design Direction
The book quickly became a PNW bestseller, and received rave reviews from The Stranger, Seattle Times, Amazon readers and The Seattle Review of Books, who called the book "a stunner.”
Color samples were further broken down into percentages of color—the longer the bar, the larger percentage of the sky was that color on that particular day. The cloudless blue skies during the summer and early fall months stand out in stark relief against the backdrop of subtle gray hues that were present for the rest of the year.
Seattle, like San Francisco and other cities, is experiencing enormous structural and social upheaval at an anxiety-inducing clip. Seattleness offers a key to opening the door to those much needed conversations about our changing urban landscape.
This map takes Seattle’s parcels (or units created by real-estate lot lines) and re-organizes the arbitrary urban geography to resemble and follow the growth rings of a native western red cedar (Thuja plicata)—considered a keystone species of the Pacific Northwest ecosystem and indispensable to tribes of the Salish sea.
