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In our bi-monthly Seattlemag.com column And Another Thing…, Knute Berger–who writes regularly for Seattle Magazine and Crosscut.com and is a frequent pundit on KUOW–takes an in-depth look at some of the highly topical and sometimes polarizing issues in our city.

There’s a lot to be critical of when it comes to Seattle’s proposed waterfront makeover. We learned from Mayor Ed Murray last week that the more than $1-billion project is already coming in some $200 million over the last estimate–and it’s still on the drawing boards. The mayor has requested cuts. One cut could be the nearly $25 million floating swimming pool proposed for Elliott Bay.

I worry that the project’s outcome will carry with it the usual downsides of gentrification: small, local businesses pushed out, a public park space that will be expensive to maintain and “activate,” and most of the benefits accruing to high-end real-estate developers. But what still bugs the heck out of me is how the James Corner Field Operations designers can’t seem to generate an image of the new waterfront without looking silly.

Earlier this year I complained that their renderings were too sunny, too white, and filled with non-native tree species. They made the new waterfront look like San Diego. I wasn’t the only critic. Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times likened the look to Bellevue and Disneyland.

The designers apparently heard our objections because recent images have tried to show something that looks a tad more like the actual Seattle we live in. So, points for that. Except that the images still end up looking, well, just off. You’d think for all the money we’re spending we could get a realistic look at what we’re buying.

Take this new picture, the first I’ve seen that actually shows rain and gray skies. It’s of the planned Overlook Walkway that will connect the Pike Place Market with the waterfront. The plan now sports a covered area for inclement weather–sensible–but the weather behaves strangely: the light is brighter under the shelter and the ground underneath remains dry even where there’s a gap in the shelter’s roof. The south-facing view is in the direction from which rainstorms generally come, yet there is no indication of the wind. The rain in the image drops vertically; you and I know that, especially, in a raised open space near the bay it’s often horizontal.

The designers seem to have taken the issue of diversity more seriously–note that they’ve planted a squatting Asian and, rather absurdly, an African American man in shorts and sandals in the middle of the image. Perhaps he was a tourist lured by waterfront design images of endless summer. Still missing are old people, fat people, panhandlers, etc. We might be damp, but we’re still sanitized.

And what city are we looking at? We see the Great Wheel, a docking ferry, and the cranes of the Port of Seattle in SoDo. But the hill in the distance looks more like San Francisco with white, low-rise buildings. Where’s the Smith Tower? I feel disoriented. It is the city as collage.

I understand that these pictures are meant to give us a concept, to sell ideas. I could be accused of nit-picking. But to me, the James Corner renderings increase my unease. We keep getting images of the future through eyes that don’t seem to understand the place they’re remaking.