Work · Public systems

Lithos

Lithos was our senior capstone — the culmination of four years of school, undertaken by an eight-person Integrated Project Delivery team against a real-world RFP at 701 9th Avenue North in South Lake Union. The building is purely public: an immersive art gallery, makerspace, market, spa, and lounge at the base; offices in the middle; a public rooftop above. We were one of two finalist teams who presented to the architectural firm developing the site, and the competition awarded us second place.

Site 701 9th Ave N, Seattle

Program Gallery · makerspace · market · spa · offices · rooftop

Team 8-person IPD · architecture + CM

Target LBC Petal Certification

Outcome Finalist presentation · 2nd place

Lithos was a genuinely collaborative project; the prose on this page says we throughout. My own hands were deepest in the massing and view-fan strategy, the public base plans, and the presentation drawing set.

Lithos from the street corner at dusk, in rain — We rendered the corner in Seattle rain on purpose — the heavy carved base and the lit glass floors above are the building's whole argument, and the weather is the condition it has to make that argument in.

Voids and cuts · form generation

Our central architectural move was a strategy of voids and cuts. Rather than maximize the envelope and add a courtyard as an afterthought, we carved gathering rooms out of the massing itself. The voids organize the section as much as they organize the plan; standing on the roof, you can see down through one of them into the gallery and the makerspace at the base. The cuts in plan let the building hold light and weather without surrendering its program to either.

The massing is oriented around the views the site actually has. From the upper floors there are clear sightlines to the Space Needle and to Lake Union, and we organized the floor plates and the office layout around those view fans rather than against them. The cores are consolidated along the western edge — out of the view fans — so the floor plates stay open and the rooftop faces the things the neighborhood already comes to this corner for.

Massing sequence — the block and the volume carved from it — This pair of drawings — the full envelope above, the gathering rooms carved out of it below — did more work in our team conversations than any rendering.

The section

Building section through the public base, office floors, and rooftop — We let the section carry the argument: the cave-like public rooms at the base, the disciplined office floors above, and the void that lets you stand on the roof and see down into the gallery.

Lithos kept its position through the negotiation. The voids stayed in. The heavy base stayed in. The view orientation stayed in.

Rooms that belong to the city

The program is purely public. The heavy base holds an immersive art gallery, a makerspace, a market, a spa, and a lounge — rooms that belong to the city, not to a private tenant; there are no residential units anywhere in the building. The base is masonry-bodied and grounded, and refers to the historic Denny Dwelling that long predates the current district; the upper floors are transparent and read against the tech-era skyline that surrounds the block now. The building does not pretend the neighborhood is one thing or the other. The argument is about what a single block can give back to a neighborhood that has, in the last decade, given up a great deal of its public ground.

The carved concrete entry from the street — We kept the entry low and heavy so that walking in feels like entering the carved ground of the block, not a lobby.

The makerspace under the vaulted base — The makerspace sits inside the base's vaults; the stools roll because we meant the room to be rearranged by whoever is using it that night.

The lounge at the foot of the stair — We gave the lounge the base's darkest, quietest register — the counterweight to the market and gallery around it.

The public rooftop against the downtown skyline — We kept the rooftop public to the top of the building — planted, shaded, and aimed at the skyline the neighborhood already comes here to see.

Drawn, costed, built — one language

CNC-paneled space frame structural study — The CNC-paneled space frame behind the building's GFRC panels is where the construction-management half of our team and the architecture half found common language — a system that could be drawn, costed, and sequenced without the three readings contradicting each other.

The technical work was inseparable from the architectural work. We ran the project the way a firm would, coordinating cost estimation, construction sequencing, and the certification requirements of the Living Building Challenge Petal in the same conversation in which we were resolving massing and view fans — against a triple-bottom-line objective: a competitive market return, a real contribution to the neighborhood’s public life, and the environmental rigor Petal demands.

The semester culminated in a defense before a panel of industry leaders that included the actual Seattle architectural team developing the site. What we take from the second-place finish has less to do with the placement than with the discipline of a real RFP held against a real pro forma, a real public-benefit test, and a real certification.