First Light
Architecture

The fundamentals of the design devised by James KM Cheng Architects for First Light began with their careful study of its location within Seattle at Third and Virginia. At the macro level, this corner site can be interpreted variously as being at the eastern edge of Belltown, the northern edge of the downtown core, or at the southern extension of South Lake Union. Without doubt, this crucial corner site is subject to influence from all three of these key zones of Seattle’s urban core. From the start, Cheng felt a tower here needed to be restrained in its massing and detailing, not addressing just one of these adjacencies, but all of them. This represents a significantly greater design challenge than shaping a typical building.

At a finer grain of understanding this locale within the city, Third and Virginia is an unusually prominent location, being one of those places where Seattle’s urban grid shifts, slightly. By virtue of this block pattern change around it, the site can be seen many blocks away when looking west along Third Avenue, and also from downhill, when looking up Virginia from the Pike Place Market area. The design team began thinking of this as a turning point, as one of those places where the city shifts, meaning that simple design discriminations of what is “front” and “back” or “prominent” and “subordinate” could not be made. This urban situation meant that First Light’s corners would have unusually prominent architectural features, requiring a true building in the round.

JKMC Architects has envisioned ingenious design features in response to these considerations. The design team wanted to avoid a monolithic presence; using the same elevation treatment on all four sides would not work within the urban grain of Third Avenue and the Pike Place Market area. It was decided that the elevations would change as they went up, zones with differing details and palette to break the uniformity, creating visual interest and reducing the apparent mass of the tower. Residential suites with larger balconies were grouped together at the corners in blocks of multiple floors on the west and south elevations, their surface color a more prominent band of white. Moreover, this white banding would wrap around these prominent corners, alternating as they go up. That this detail communicates onto the exterior of the building the differing residential unit types within is a feature typical of the updated Modernism that is the core design philosophy at James KM Cheng Architects.

Many of the decisions regarding the building’s composition were driven by its immediate context. Early on it was decided that about one fifth of First Light’s floor space would be devoted to office space. The adjacent brick YWCA Building and many other neighbors are five to eight stories high. This became the cue to set the First Light office block’s height, a wider building mass, which serves as a podium for the residential floors above. Moreover, this allowed the amenity decks for the office component to look out onto neighboring Belltown’s historic roofscapes, with partial views out to the harbor and the Olympics, an apple orchard planted there to bring a natural element into the built environment. John Hogan’s “veil” of strung glass disks beaded on cables set outside the windows of the office floors have several functions. As the views from these lower floors are mainly out towards parking garages and brick walls, the glass artwork also serves to both diffuse views and increase privacy within. From the outside, the slight movements of the glass works forms an utterly contemporary elevation and a series of luminous sculptural moments shrouding the podium in soft, multi-faceted displays of light.

James Cheng’s design for First Light echoes the Chicago high-rise pioneer Louis Sullivan’s promotion of a tripartite composition rule for tall buildings. Inspired by design of columns from the Greco-Roman tradition, Sullivan proposed that towers should have a base, a pillar, and a cap, or capital. Conforming to this logic for the composition of tall buildings, at First Light, the retail and office podium are the base, the many floors of residential suites form the pillar and the penthouse and resident’s amenity floors that blossom on levels 46 and 47 are the capital. At the top of the tower, Cheng’s cantilevered swimming pool with wood-grain printed aluminum panels covering its soffit, supported on huge V-columns provides a distinctive addition to the Seattle skyline. This up-top massing provides a strong horizontal line that masterfully terminates the rise of vertical lines up through 47 stories, whether viewed from the sidewalk below or from across the city. This same concern with proportion and beauty informs all other exterior details, down to the most minute detail.

Like the tree-topping large nests that provide homes to eagles, the rooftop at First Light will become a haven for its residents, one which will fast emerge as a symbol for a new way of living downtown. Visible from around the city, the composition of a living green wall, secret rooftop garden, and a fine steel mesh wrapping around is composed and elegant. These, in addition to the amenity rooms shrouded in glass, make for a carefully resolved ensemble as climax to the tower. Through-out his career, James Cheng has elected to design small and medium scale private residences. These skills are evident in the finesse of First Light’s spectacular top floors, which will update the notion of a landmark tower in dialogue with the iconic Space Needle, with which it aligns, in many senses of that word.

In devising a palette of materials appropriate for First Light, James Cheng’s design team drew inspiration from Seattle’s long tradition of craft and invention, from the marine workshops lining the Ship Canal to Boeing’s factories, the simple but improvised concrete sheds of the Pike Place market and the futurism of Seattle Center. The JKMCA organizing philosophy was to use building materials and finishes in the most direct form possible, in contrast to the artificiality of overpolished design. Concrete is exposed wherever possible, its formwork markings left in place. This includes inside residential suites, where concrete columns are typically boxed-in with surrounding wallboard, reducing usable space. In the view of the architects, residents appreciate this reminder of the larger building in which they reside, providing a touch of the aesthetic of downtown lofts, rather than hotel rooms. James Cheng’s firm has been praised over the years for careful space planning considerations like these, making every corner and square inch usable, evident even when examining the floorplans of the smallest suites.

The lobby will present more like a gallery, with polished concrete walls, a floor and concierge desk of honed basalt, and a ceiling of smoked, polished stainless steel, all bathed in a wash of light that will emphasize the custom Fazioli piano and John Hogan’s artwork. To emphasize the openness of space, in-floor windows set within this concrete floor will provide views to the bicycle storage room below. Matte black panels leading residents to the elevators will be finished with jade onyx panels and terrazzo interiors. The cast concrete structure and V-shaped pool supports at the rooftop amenity level are similarly direct and exposed. With this, the composition of the building balances horizontal elements with vertical ones. “Light as a Common Thread” applies to even the simplest of architectural details, like the edges of balconies. The building is clad in pre-manufactured structural glass panels, detailed to visually evoke the aesthetic of a continuous wall. Authenticity and directness in architecture – like minimalism in the visual arts – seems inevitable when experienced, but requires great care in conception and construction. First Light’s dedication to an architecture of amenity coupled with a lack of artifice will inaugurate a new class of residential buildings for a changing Seattle.