I’d probably passed by the building hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Commuting to a variety of jobs over the last several years, by car and by bus, I’ve gone by the corner of Denny and Dexter twice a day, almost every day – and yet I’d never bothered to really look at the Seattle Park Department Administration building.

That’s not a big surprise; I think most of us zone out during our commute. The route, the signs, the streets and the buildings – they all just blend into the background. And whether your travels take 10 minutes or an hour, you’d be hard pressed to remember anything you saw or thought during the trip.

For some reason though, the other day, I really did look at the building. And I realized that this was the building I’d been looking for. This was the building that my Great-Grandfather helped design. It was one of the last major projects of a fairly successful architectural career in the Seattle area. And it had been sitting right in front of me the whole time.

I’ve seen a picture of it in its heyday – a sleek modern building that won the Grand Honor Award in 1950 from the Seattle chapter of the AIA. It was a prime example of mid-century modern architecture, although it predates the use of that term by a few years, and was a relatively early instance of it for a public building in the Seattle area.

Standing in front of it the other day though, it looked a little worse for the wear. The flat roof appears to have had some trouble with the last 60 years of rain, and a huge brown tarp covers one section.

As I looked at it in its declined state, I debated whether I even really like this sort of architecture. It’s probably never been more popular – helped in no small part by the Mad Men phenomenon. But I’ve always been more drawn to the aesthetics of buildings built in the 1920s or 1930s.

That said, it’s hard not to appreciate how revolutionary these buildings were in their day. Compared to the landscape around it in 1949 (before the boom of mediocrity surrounding the 1962 World’s Fair or the big box condos of the early-2000s) this building truly stood out. It took courage as an architect (and a city) to make that sort of statement. As I understand it, putting a building in Denny Park at all wasn’t an especially popular decision.

At the very least, stumbling upon this building made me do a little research about my Great-Grandfather. And as it turns out, this is just one of several buildings still around that he had a hand in designing. So I’ll divert my commute again next week on behalf of his legacy to check out the Baroness Apartment Building on First Hill. From the pictures I’ve seen, it’s more my style.