The architecture of Seattle, Washington, the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., features elements that predate the arrival of the area's first settlers of European ancestry in the mid-19th century, and has reflected and influenced numerous architectural styles over time. As of the early 21st century, a major construction boom continues to redefine the city's downtown area as well as neighborhoods such as Capitol Hill, Ballard and, perhaps most dramatically, South Lake Union.Overall citation for the boom: This article originally appeared in the June 2015 issue of Western Real Estate Business magazine.
Native and native-influenced architecture
Prior to the arrival of European settlers in the Puget Sound area, the largest building in the Salish Sea region was Old Man House, a longhouse roughly northwest of Downtown Seattle near the present-day town of Suquamish. Measuring roughly in length, it was the largest longhouse ever known and remained the largest building in the region until it was burned by the United States government in 1870.
While there were no native structures of this scale within the city limits of present-day Seattle, the Duwamish tribe had at least 13 villages in that area. Of these, the largest and most important was ("little crossing-over place") near present-day Pioneer Square, with an estimated 200 people in 1800, before Old World diseases caused massive death in the region. It consisted of eight longhouses, each roughly , and an even larger potlatch house.
Although no significant architectural structures from the era before European settlement survive as anything more than archaeological sites, several present-day Seattle buildings deliberately evoke traditional regional Native American architecture. Examples of this include Daybreak Star Cultural Center in Discovery Park, owned by the United Indians of All Tribes; the Duwamish Longhouse, owned by the Duwamish tribe, just west of the Duwamish River, roughly across the street from the present-day Herring's House Park, whose name commemorates the second-largest historical Duwamish village, tohl-AHL-too ("herring's house") or hah-AH-poos ("where there are horse clams"); wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ ("Intellectual House"), a multi-service learning and gathering space for Native American students, faculty and staff on the Seattle campus of the University of Washington; and Ivar's Salmon House, a restaurant on the north shore of Lake Union.
Prominent architects
Among the first significant architects in the Pacific Northwest after European settlement were Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart (born Esther Pariseau) and the barely-documented Donald McKay; neither has surviving work in Seattle, although works of both survive in Vancouver, Washington. In Seattle, the two collaborated on Providence Hospital (built 1882–1883; destroyed 1911) at Fifth and Madison, the current site of the William Kenzo Nakamura United States Courthouse. McKay was also responsible in the years 1882–1884 for a major enlargement of the now-demolished Catholic Church of Our Lady of Good Help, as well as designing the Occidental Hotel (First and Yesler, later site of the Seattle Hotel and now the "Sinking Ship" parking garage) and Seattle Engine House No. 1 (both lost in the 1889 Fire) and the Holy Names Academy at Seventh and Jackson (lost in the Jackson Street regrade of 1906).
Elmer H. Fisher, an exponent of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, came to prominence immediately after the 1889 fire; he designed many of the new "fireproof" buildings in what is now the Pioneer Square neighborhood. His best-known surviving building is the Pioneer Building (built 1889–1891) directly on Pioneer Square at First and Yesler; his equally grand Burke Building, built at the same time, was demolished to make way for the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building; a few of its decorative elements survive on the plaza of that Federal Building. Two other surviving Fisher buildings are also right at First and Yesler: the Yesler Building on the southwest corner and the Mutual of New York Building on the northwest corner, both initially built 1890–1891 and later enlarged. His Austin A. Bell Building (1889–1890, now Bell Apartments) remains an equally prominent feature of Belltown. p.24 specifically refers to the Pioneer Building and Burke Building as the two major commissions that established Fisher: "With these two commissions, Fisher emerged as the leading architect in Seattle just before the 1889 fire."
Englishman Charles Herbert Bebb and German Louis Leonard Mendel made their separate ways to Seattle in the 1890s. Their partnership Bebb & Mendel (1901–1914) was the city's most prominent architectural firm during its period of activity. Among their many surviving buildings in Seattle are the University Heights School (first portion built 1902), now a community center; the William Walker House (built 1906–1907, also known as "Hill-Crest") in the Washington Park neighborhood, now the official residence of the president of the University of Washington; the First Church of Christ, Scientist on Capitol Hill (built in two phases, 1908–1909, 1912–14), now converted into condominium apartments; the Frye Hotel (built 1906–1911); the Hoge Building (built 1909–1911) briefly the city's tallest building; and Fire Station No. 18 (built 1910–1911) in Ballard, now a bar and restaurant.
Another Englishman who figured prominently in Seattle architecture was Liverpool-born John Graham, Sr. From 1905 to 1910 he was in partnership with David J. Myers; they designed houses, apartment buildings, and several Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition pavilions. A prominent surviving Myers-Graham building is the main ("Seaview") building of The Kenney, a retirement home in West Seattle. He established his own firm in 1910; his numerous downtown buildings in this period include the Joshua Green Building (1913); the Frederick and Nelson department store (1916–1919), now Nordstrom's flagship store; and the Dexter Horton Building (1921–1924), an office building for First Seattle Dexter Horton National Bank, later Seafirst Bank. Other buildings from this period include the Ford Assembly Plant Building (1913) near the southeast corner of Lake Union—later home to the printer Craftsman Press and is now used as a self-storage building—and the Seattle Yacht Club (1919–1921) in Montlake. In the late 1920s he began working along Art Deco lines, with such buildings as the Roosevelt Hotel (1928–1929); the Bon Marché (1928–1929), now a Macy's; and the Exchange Building (1929–1931). Grant Hildebrand counts the Exchange Building as "perhaps Graham's finest work." He collaborated with Bebb and Gould on the U.S. Marine Hospital complex at the north end of Beacon Hill (1931–1934), later for more than a decade headquarters of Amazon.com, now Pacific Tower. Graham lived until 1955, but he collaborated with William L. Painter in New York City 1936–1942, and it was mainly Graham's son John Graham, Jr. who eventually built back up a Seattle practice for the firm.
Iowa-born Harlan Thomas started his career in Colorado and traveled widely before arriving in Seattle in his mid-30s in 1906. By the end of 1907, he had already made his mark with his own Mediterranean-style villa on the west slope of Queen Anne Hill, the eclectic Chelsea Family Hotel across from Kinnear Park, and the Italianate Sorrento Hotel on the First Hill edge of Downtown before adopting a more stripped-down style influenced by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. In the following years he designed a number of schools around Washington state and partnered with various other architects on prominent Seattle buildings: with Clyde Grainger he designed the Corner Market building in Pike Place Market (1911–1912); with W. Marbury Somervell, three Carnegie libraries (1912–1915); with Schack, Young & Myers the Seattle Chamber of Commerce Building (1923–1925); and in the partnership Thomas, Grainger, and Thomas (the latter Thomas being his own son Donald), Seattle's Rhodes Department Store (1926–1927, later Arcade Plaza Building, now demolished), William O. McKay Ford Sales and Service Building (1925, now reconstructed as part of the Allen Institute for Brain Science), and Harborview Hospital (1929–1931). Other projects in and around Seattle included two fraternal buildings at the University of Washington (the former Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, 1914, now Tau Kappa Epsilon, and the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, 1930), a 500-unit World- War II-era housing project in Bremerton, Washington, and speculative housing designed for developer Albert Balch in northeast Seattle. He also taught architecture at the University of Washington 1926–1940.
Ellsworth Storey was from Chicago, first visited Seattle as a teenager, and settled there in 1903 after earning an architecture degree from the University of Illinois. Like Harlan Thomas, he debuted in Seattle as his own client, building a home for his parents and an adjacent one for himself and his wife. These Ellsworth Storey Residences in Denny-Blaine, completed in 1905, already show his characteristic style; as Grant Hildebrand describes it, "deep eaves, horizontal stretches of mullioned glazing, and above all the imaginative use of modest local materials," with influences from Swiss chalets, the Prairie School, and the English Arts and Crafts movement. (Bernard Maybeck in the San Francisco Bay Area seems to have arrived independently at a similar style.) "Although... hardly known nationally, few architects have engendered greater local affection." Not all of Storey's work is in this style: for example, his 1908 house for J.K. Gordon in the Mount Baker neighborhood is Georgian Revival, and many of his buildings fall broadly under the heading of Tudor Revival, such as Hoo-Hoo House (1909)—which was built for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and subsequently served until 1959 as the University of Washington Faculty Club—and a 1915–1916 Unitarian church, now University Presbyterian Church Chapel. In the 1920s, he designed numerous Seattle residences, church buildings, etc. Meanwhile, back in 1910–1915, Storey had acquired land near Colman Park on the Lake Washington shore and, on speculation, built a set of cottages in his characteristic style. This last proved a lucky thing for him, because in the Great Depression when there was little work for architects, he was still able to earn rents as a landlord while working on government projects such as parks throughout Western Washington and, during World War II, at Sand Point Naval Station.
After his partner Louis Mendel retired in 1914, Charles Bebb partnered with Carl F. Gould in the firm Bebb & Gould. Bebb was more the businessman and engineer; Gould—who in this same period founded the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington (U.W.)—the designer and planner. The firm's style evolved from Historicism toward Art Moderne. Early on, the firm designed the Times Square Building (1913–1915) for the Seattle Times, the Administration Building (1914–1916) of the Ballard Locks, and developed a General Plan (1915) for the U.W. campus. They contributed to the tradition of Collegiate Gothic with U.W.'s Suzzallo Library—T. William Booth and William H. Wilson characterize the second-story reading room as Gould's "most inspired" interior space—before taking a decidedly more modern/Deco turn with Seattle's U.S. Marine Hospital (1930–1932; later, successively, Public Health Hospital, Pacific Medical Center, and with an additional wing Amazon.com headquarters; now Pacific Tower), the Art Institute of Seattle (1931–1933, now Seattle Asian Art Museum), and shortly before Gould's death in 1939, U.W.'s Penthouse Theater (1938–1940).