Retro-Modern Donuts

I believe Monsieur especially will enjoy this piece of retro-modern confection known as Top-Pot Donuts, in particular the photos of the downtown Seattle location. Ironically, through sheer romantic attachment to modernist revival retail design, they have newly built from the ground up the most beautiful donut shop in Seattle. Also, the donuts are extremely delicious, and the legions of surprisingly if temporarily trim young female customers are not unappreciated.

It should be noted that such design would not be tolerated in many architectural firms, because while it is beautiful and sleek and looks to the high modern era, it's would be considered a reactionary, overtly ironic interest in past forms of graceful design and materials.

It's the materials that carry the design: the brushed aluminum staircases, dark crushed rock floor tiles with aluminum trim pieces waxed to a Hollywood sheen, birch plywood and industrial pane glass everywhere. The workmanship is remarkable. The logos and materials all deliberately evoke the period, and even the walls are lined with books from the 1920s-50s.

All this of course, is an interest in form for it's own sake, decontextualizing the style, which only underscores its rejection of architectural modernism and post-modernism as an aesthetic ideology. Firm in with Seattle's zeitgeist, a perfect match to the Space Needle, it celebrates and refines the Atomic era, but from a light-hearted distance.

I cannot begin to tell you what an aesthetic error this would be considered among many architects.