Seattle Art Museum

The Odd Couple: Washington Mutual Bank Headquarters and the Seattle Art Museum move in together.

The genesis of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) expansion and renovation was a complex and visionary public-private partnership between the museum and Washington Mutual Bank. Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture had to design an expansion that would be many things: a flexible framework that allows the museum to expand and transform over 20 years, a vibrant public institution that contributes to the life of the city, and finally, a cultural institution comprised of galleries of diverse scale, proportion and lighting.

The creative collaboration that resulted in the SAM expansion project established a matrix of existing conditions that defines the new design; the new building’s height, setbacks, floor areas, overall area, and floor-to-floor heights were fixed conditions. As an expansion, the new building had to add 300,000 square feet of space to the original 1991 Venturi Scott Brown museum. Perhaps the most compelling part of the development agreement was the mandate for growth and change over time; from the outset, the building had to be designed to transform – the museum occupied four full floors of the expansion when it opened in May 2007, and will grow vertically in stages, ultimately expanding to occupy 12 stories of the 16-story building.

The prominent building site mandated a scheme that would contribute fully to the life of downtown Seattle. The design establishes an immediate connection to the street, rising from the sidewalk without setback to the maximum height of 180 feet. Transparent public spaces engage the life of the city with an immediacy that joins street and lobby, sidewalk and gallery. The design establishes a constant connection between the user and the landscape beyond by maximizing transparency: physically, through the glass walls of the new public spaces, where pedestrians can see into the heart of the galleries, and spatially, in the series of interconnected double-height galleries that unify and energize the vertical experience, creating continual points of orientation.

The building skin is a steel-and-glass curtain wall system designed to capture and refract Seattle’s ever-changing weather and light. Four articulated L-shaped “shells” pin-wheel around the corners of the building’s floor plates. Each shell segment engages natural light in a different way. The north-facing shell is floor-to-ceiling glass to flood galleries on that side with natural light; the northwest side is mostly opaque except to provide select moments of visual connection to the city and bay. The southwest side has ever-changing light from an operable brise-soleil system, and the south face allows top light in through a scrim.

The stated goal of the project is the creation of beautiful, serene and diverse spaces for the wide-ranging SAM collection. Galleries of varying height and size create intimate rooms for small objects and grander spaces for monumental works of contemporary art. Variety of scale is achieved with a mix of ceiling heights, gallery orientation, and gallery depths that vary from floor to floor.  The scale mix establishes a ratio of gallery types suitable to small, medium or large format works of art, as well as a range of conservation zones, with lower and higher light levels.

Formal name of project: Seattle Art Museum

Location: Seattle, Washington

Gross square footage:
Existing building renovation:  150,000 sq.ft.
Addition total:  450,000 sq.ft.
Planned expansion: 300,000 sq.ft.
Initial occupancy: 118,000 sq.ft.

Total construction cost: $86 million

Completion Date: Opened May, 2006

Owner: Seattle Art Museum

Architect:
Allied Works Architecture
910 NW Hoyt
Portland, OR 97209
p- 503.227.1737
f- 503.227.6509
alliedworks.com/launch.html

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