The Verdant Stack
Out of the Box of Offices
04/
Type
Commercial Workspace
45,000 sq ft
Size
2035
Completed
Seattle, Washington
Project Story
A mid‑rise urban workplace that stacks sculpted steel volumes around a lush interior winter garden, creating a vertical campus where landscape, light, and collaborative workspaces seamlessly overlap.
DESIGN TEAM
Jordan Lee (Lead), Priya Deshmukh, Aaron Castillo
PHOTOGRAPHY
Studio Lamlozs
year
2035
The Brief
The client envisioned a flexible office building that would stand out in a dense innovation district while offering generous indoor‑outdoor connections in a rainy climate. Beyond rentable floor area, they asked for a signature communal space that could host informal meetings, events, and everyday moments of pause for tenants and the public. The project needed to balance a bold, expressive exterior with efficient, highly adaptable floor plates. Durability, low maintenance, and strong sustainability performance were core priorities from the outset.
The Approach
We organized the building as a series of offset steel‑clad boxes, each rotated to capture daylight and frame oblique views up and down the street. The stepped massing carves out terraces and overhangs, providing weather‑protected entries at grade and generous planted balconies above. A continuous glazed spine runs vertically through the building, enclosing a multi‑story atrium that functions as a shared living room for all tenants. Structural systems and mechanical distribution were carefully coordinated to keep edges clear, allowing for flexible tenant layouts over time without compromising the iconic form.
The DETAILS
The exterior is wrapped in weathering steel panels whose warm patina softens the building’s crisp geometry and echoes the industrial heritage of the surrounding neighborhood. Large-format glazing is deeply recessed to control glare and emphasize the thickness of the corten envelope. Inside, planted green walls rise through the atrium, supported by integrated irrigation and lighting systems that create a temperate microclimate year‑round. Exposed concrete floors, blackened steel guardrails, and locally sourced timber ceilings provide a restrained material palette, while high‑performance glazing, operable windows, and rainwater collection contribute to the project’s ambitious environmental goals.
