For designer of Kingdome, its demise blows him away

"Several years ago I had this exotic dream," said the man who designed the Kingdome, and who tried to save his misunderstood creation, "that they wouldn't know what they were doing when they set off that bunch of explosives."

But they knew what they were doing. After all, they had access to Jack Christiansen's original plans, the ones that showed the Kingdome columns had some of the thickest reinforced steel bars in the industry, and had been built to exceed all building codes.

The structural engineer who designed the Kingdome, now 72 and retired on Bainbridge Island, couldn't bear to be here when it happened. He and his wife Sue went to Aspen to visit friends. His answering machine kept filling up with calls from media around the world, wanting a quote about: "How do you feel?"

Sue reads this column and told her husband to call this guy back. How do you feel? How do you think? Sad, mad, all of that.

"They never painted it like they were supposed to," Sue said about her husband's creation. "They took from it but never gave back anything."

In Aspen, on Sunday morning, she did talk Jack into watching a few minutes on television when it happened. Jack thought to himself that they must have used more explosives than for any other building that's ever been destroyed.

"This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen done," he said. A perfectly good, usable building, a structure that could have lasted 1,000 years, an engineering marvel, and they blew it apart. For what? "It happened because big-time professional sports is out of control, that's why," Christiansen said. "They get to do anything they want. This facility stood in the way."

And the Kingdome was an engineering marvel. It wasn't until the building's death countdown began that most Seattleites probably even had an inkling of the technological feat in their midst. Around the world, other engineers knew.

One of them is David Billington, professsor of engineering at Princeton University. On Sunday, he made sure he didn't watch the news. "It was much too painful. It's a wanton act of urban vandalism to tear down a perfectly good structure. If it had lasted 50 years, it would have become a national historic landmark."

Billington had even nominated the Kingdome to the Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, in what turned out to be another futile attempt to save it.

"The Kingdome is unique; there is no other concrete dome in the world comparable to it in scale, in form, or in appearance," he wrote in the application.

Just this week, Billington had been explaining to his wife the uniqueness of a "hyperbolic paraboloid form." That's what the Kingdome was - a curved structure that allows it to be thin, and extremely strong.

And so the engineers couldn't understand why.

Yes, Billington knew the dome had been called ugly.

Ugly? "The Eiffel Tower was criticized for a long time as an ugly railroad structure put in the middle of beautiful Paris. They almost tore it down," Billington said. "But it was a structure that made no concession to passing fashions."

If only the Kingdome had more time. If it had been given a chance to showcase its crude beauty.

"Why a lot of people didn't appreciate the Kingdome is hard for me to answer," he said. Maybe it was the sports writers whining about watching baseball indoors. Maybe it was not having enough women's lavatories. Maybe it was those ceiling tiles falling.

Tiles falling had nothing to do with the structure. Toilets? They could have put more in. They didn't.

Christiansen mailed me sketches he had done to renovate the Kingdome. They could have put in a new floor at about the 100-level for staging concerts and playing certain sports. They could have put in shops, offices and a new entrance. They could have added large windows to let the light in.

"Almost everybody I know says to me that they don't understand why this happened," he said.

And so last Sunday, Christiansen watched his creation blown up, and this week he returned to Bainbridge Island.

But every day, Christiansen knows the possibilities of a concrete dome. All he has to do is look up at the concrete roof of his own home. There it is, a smaller version of the hyperbolic paraboloid form.

Erik Lacitis' column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His phone number is 206-464-2237. His e-mail address is: elacitis@seattletimes.com.