Once the pandemic passes and everyone can stop thinking about relocating to Butte, perhaps we can reconnect with the imaginative spirit that fuels what it means to live in a high-tech city. One Seattle architect has already started daydreaming.
Seattle 2030 is a “conceptual exploration” of how the COVID-19 crisis could affect the real estate industry in general and life “as we know it” in particular, according to Ro Shroff, a partner and senior vice president at 3MIX, an international architecture and planning firm based in Shanghai, Seattle and Hong Kong.
Shroff’s skyscraper vision doesn’t just upend what we consider to be a tall building in Seattle — at 1,320 feet it would dwarf the 937-foot-tall Columbia Center. The concept also aims to redefine current typologies (workplace, urban living, leisure), and negate the perceptions of a “hermetically sealed edifice.”
Shroff, who worked as design partner on the concept along with associate Shaina Yang, who is currently at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, wrote about Seattle 2030 in an article published by CTBUH Journal, a periodic publication of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. He also shared his thoughts in a LinkedIn post and via email with GeekWire.
Constructed predominantly of mass timber, with a hybrid system of steel exoskeletal frames and concrete cores, Seattle 2030 is a hexagonal configuration defined by three interconnected sub-towers with a central multi-storied void. It’s all divided into eight distinct “vertical blocks” by interstitial steel “diaphragm” floors.
At the top is a cloud walk observatory to serve as an iconic signature atop the warm wood of the lower structure. In between, urban living as we know it is turned up to 11.
“Seattle needs a world-class development not only in magnitude but also in iconography,” Shroff said. “The tower’s predominant wood aesthetic and constitution, sky parks, drone ports, an exterior tuned mass damper, a vertical take-off and landing skyport and a vertigo-inducing glass-floored ‘cloud-walk’ observatory would be the next decade’s answer to the Space Needle.”
Calling Seattle’s crop of tall buildings “fairly restrained” to date, Shroff said the new Rainier Square Tower breaks new ground, but his personal favorite is still the Seattle Library with its “unconventional cantilevers and sculptural iconography.”
The Seattle 2030 concept is not site specific, but is intended to be located in the city’s downtown core.
There are plenty of hurdles in 2020 Seattle to getting Seattle 2030 built, such as FAA approval of the tower’s height, safety codes, insurance and regulatory oversight, and most importantly, Shroff said, political will.
“The idea could invariably be built at more modest heights but could not generate much enthusiasm. It needs to be bold,” he said, adding that while it could very well exist in Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai or elsewhere, Seattle makes sense because of its “global identity and technology predominance.”
Along with such things as how to deal with elevator capacity in a post-pandemic skyscraper, the workplace component of the tower is sure to be the most transformed by what has happened with remote work policies that have reshaped where we’ll work going forward.
“Flight to the suburbs is being touted as the new mantra,” Shroff said.
Companies reducing physical space as a response to the crisis and as a cost-cutting measure will translate to future tower tenants who opt for smaller, decentralized venues for collaborating and ideating as the crisis recedes, Shroff wrote. The Seattle 2030 workspace will require smaller floorplates and lower occupancy needs. There will be open-air atriums, lushly landscaped vertical gardens with water walls, sky bridges, and natural ventilation.
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“Although the concept may be considered utopian, it is grounded in realistic precepts,” Shroff said. Building technology to construct a tower like Seattle 2030 already exists.”
He added that the cost, hovering around $1 billion 10 years from now, could be intimidating at initial glance.
“However, such investment is worth its cost if it defines new avenues of achieving wellness, mitigating climate change, redefining urban typologies, and creating signature icons in the Emerald City,” Shroff said. “But I will leave it for pundits, prognosticators, and the city’s political and entrepreneurial leadership to attest, applaud or accept.
See more images and details about the concept in Shroff’s LinkedIn post.
