Seattle 2030: The Post-Crisis Tower

The Tall Building Strategically Reconsidered

The current perception of a post-COVID world is highly divisive and despairing. The “death of the tall building” is touted by prognosticators as a fait accompli. The concept of the city as a microcosm of commerce, urban living, culture, and civic uses has been put into severe doubt and paranoia. Density, mass transit and assembly uses are suddenly deemed as anathema to “normal” lifestyles, and the flight to the suburbs is touted as the new mantra. This project is an exploration of what a post-crisis vertical vision would reflect in urban America, responding to changing norms of the workplace, urban living, leisure, and transit. Its prototype is a hybrid 400-meter mass timber structure ensconced within a steel exoskeletal frame. With 90 percent of the tower comprised of mass timber, the 88-story structure would sequester carbon, reduce emissions, enhance structural performance and set new paradigms of the tall building as a modular, living-breathing machine, responding to the “new normal” of the contemporary urban condition.