More Action at the Burke Museum

6/18/19 New Burke Museum building

A few months ago, I inadvertently stumbled upon demolition of the old Burke Museum when I was on the University of Washington campus to sketch cherry blossoms. Passing through campus earlier this week, I went to see what the site looked like now. Most traces of the old building are gone, but lots of excavators and other heavy equipment were everywhere, and the grounds (a new parking lot?) still looked rough and nowhere near completion.

In the background stands the new Burke getting ready for its grand reopening this fall. As excited as I am to visit the new, much larger natural history museum – the old one gave me many hours of sketching fun, and I’m sure the new one will, too – its new building is the type that I don’t enjoy drawing much. Clean and modern, the roofline is very subtly curved, so it ends up looking either like it was meant to be straight but my lines were crooked, or I curved it too much. In this case, it’s the latter – the roofline’s curve is more subtle than that. I hope to sketch the construction site again before it opens, so maybe I’ll do a more accurate job next time.

6/18/19 Construction worker taking a lunch break on a pile of debris.