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Architecture

Architecture in Seattle

Seattle builds between water on two sides and hills it regraded by washing them into the bay. The city's public buildings have absorbed more architectural risk than its office towers.

• Amazon Spheres

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  Completed 2018

  NBBJ

  Three linked glass domes at the base of an office campus downtown, planted as a conservatory. NBBJ framed them with steel arcs meeting in pentagons and filled them with tens of thousands of plants kept at the temperature and humidity of a cloud forest rather than an office. Employees work inside on walkways among the planting. It is a corporate lobby rebuilt as a greenhouse, where the plants set the conditions the people accept.

• Seattle Central Library

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  Completed 2004

  Rem Koolhaas · Joshua Prince-Ramus

  The city's central library, planned as five fixed platforms with flexible space between them. The nonfiction collection runs on one continuous ramp through four floors, so the Dewey sequence never breaks at a slab and the shelving can grow without rearranging the building. The steel and glass skin folds to follow the shifted platforms. It starts from the argument that a library is no longer only books, and then gives the books the best structure of any of the options.

• Museum of Pop Culture

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  Completed 2000

  Frank Gehry

  A music museum at the foot of the Space Needle, founded on a collection of Jimi Hendrix material. Gehry built it from thousands of shaped assemblies clad in stainless steel and painted aluminium, in gold, silver, red and blue, with the monorail running through the middle. The form was developed from the pieces of a broken electric guitar. It is the most literal thing Gehry has built, and the local name for it is the Blob.

• Chapel of St. Ignatius

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  Completed 1997

  Steven Holl

  A university chapel of tilt-up concrete panels cast on site and lifted into place. Holl described it as seven bottles of light in a stone box: seven roof volumes, each turned to a different compass direction for a different part of the liturgy. Coloured glass in the openings and painted fields behind hanging baffles throw two colours into every space, one direct and one reflected. It is small and does one thing, which is to make daylight the material the room is built from.

• Space Needle

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  Completed 1962

  John Graham Jr. · Victor Steinbrueck

  An observation tower built for the 1962 world's fair on a plot the size of a small house. Graham's office worked out the tapered core and the disc, and Steinbrueck, brought in late as a consultant, replaced the single shaft with three legs curving up to meet it. The foundation is a concrete block deeper than the tower is wide. It was privately financed and built in about a year, and has served as the civic emblem since.