ISBN10: 0295982381, ISBN13: 9780295982380, [publisher: University of Washington Press, Seattle] Hardcover Hardcover. On the afternoon of 6 June 1889, a fire in a cabinet shop in downtown Seattle spread to destroy more than thirty downtown blocks covering 116 acres. Disaster soon became opportunity as Seattle's citizens turned their full energies to rebuilding: widening and regrading streets, laying new water pipes and sewer lines, promulgating a new building ordinance requiring construction in the commercial core, and creating a new professional fire department. A remarkable number of buildings, most located in Seattle's present-day Pioneer Square Historic District, were permitted within a few months and constructed within a few years of the Great Seattle Fire. As a result, the post-fire rebuilding of Seattle offers an extraordinarily focused case study of late-nineteenth-century American urban architecture. Seattle's architects seeking design solutions that would meet the new requirements most often found them in the Romanesque Revival mode of the country's most famous architect, Henry Hobson Richardson.In contrast to Victorian Gothic, Second Empire, and other mid-nineteenth-century architectural styles, Richardson's Romanesque Revival vocabulary of relatively unadorned stone and brick with round-arched openings conveyed strength and stability without elaborate decorative treatment. For Seattle's fire-conscious architects it offered a ...