Seattle Tower

The Seattle Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Albertson, Wilson & Richardson, and built between 1927 and 1928, for a reported $1.50 million dollars, in Seattle, WA.

Seattle Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Northern Life Tower.

Its precise street address is 1218 Third Avenue, Seattle, WA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Seattle Tower is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Seattle and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Seattle Tower was officially declared as a national landmark on December 18^th 1974, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on March 31^st 1975.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1999, 2017 and 2021.

Albertson, Wilson & Richardson was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Webster & Stevens.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Seattle Tower a reality:

• Hall & Stevenson in charge of Structural Engineering
• Sound Construction & Engineering Company as the Main Contractor
• Northern Life Insurance Company as the Main Developer

The Seattle Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Seattle Tower was completed in 1928, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Seattle Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features 33 different shades of brick set in a gradient pattern, insinuating crags and cliffs. The culmination of the pillars at the crown is finished with light terracotta and metal rods. The windows, and it's spandrels with brick patters, are set back to creat vertical piers than emphasize its height of the building.

Other materials found at the Seattle Tower include, Alaska marble, wich gives the dark toned, veined finishing to the cladding of the lobby's walls, and is also found on the floors and bathrooms, and bronze, used for decorations, elevator doors and a relief map on one of the walls.