Seattle Architecture Foundation

Informative, fun, and guaranteed to make you feel like a local in a whole new way. The SAF runs somewhere upwards of 20 different tours of various parts of Seattle, and each tour guide is exceptionally well-​informed and usually entertaining as well. Last month I went on a two-​hour jaunt around Capitol Hill’s gorgeous Harvard-​Belmont historic district, and saw more than just old mansions, but a whole story of turn-​of-​the-​century Seattle I’d never imagined.
Seattle’s architecture, both old and new, is really quite stunning (says this architecture student), and this is pretty much the best way I know to get out and learn something about it. Plus, you get to point out cool trivia bits to your friends for the rest of forever.

On a typical Seattle day, overcast and gray with a chance of damp turning to drizzle, we set forth to discover the architectural details that humanize our downtown buildings.
Massive Iroquois Indian heads with terra cotta feather headdresses started our tour at the Cobb building. Somehow the Indian heads coupled with a seal depicting Hypocrites advertises that this building is in fact a medical dental building — the first in the Northwest. It all made sense when our tour guides explained it, I guess it was a location moment — you had to be there.
In perfect symmetry our tour ended in the Chinese Room of the Smith Tower. The beautiful lobby features the exact same Indian heads, but this time carved in wood. Somehow in the lobby of the Smith Tower they mean typewriters. I can’t explain why.
Along the way we saw lions, griffins, walruses, fellow Unilocalers and enough gymnasts to start a small team. But the most amazing part of the tour occurred this morning when my daughter ran up to her 5^th grade teacher and told him all about the original «green» Seattle buildings (the Dexter Horton building, City Hall and the Smith Tower) and she could explain exactly why they were «green.»
Cost of the tour: $ 15; ability to show off massive brain to teacher: priceless.