We live in NBBJ land. Few live a day in this city without seeing or
entering one of the buildings designed by one of the world’s largest
architecture firms. Formed in 1943 in Seattle by Floyd Naramore,
Clifton Brady, Perry Johanson, and William Bain Sr., the firm makes
buildings for big corporations, big entertainment, and big government.
What is big in this city is often what has been designed by NBBJ. Also,
what is modern, futuristic, and at the cutting edge of time is the
spirit of the firm. Miesian modernism had its major introduction to
this city in an NBBJ building—the Seafirst Tower (now 1001 Fourth
Avenue Plaza). Futurism as imagined by corporate power in the late
’80s—a new and bold world liberated by computer
technology—can be summed up by NBBJ’s wavy, sky-blue Two Union
Square Tower. The firm’s Seattle Justice Center is one of the fullest
expressions of what the chief urban designer for New York City,
Alexandros Washburn, calls the New Virtue, the virtue of our age.
“The Greeks may not have invented civic virtue, but they certainly
branded the idea with architecture,” posted Washburn in an article on
the Metropolis magazine website. “[But] the Corinthian column
no longer signifies virtue, civic or otherwise. There has been a
paradigm shift away from architecture. What signifies virtue these days
is a concern for nature… Just as two millennia ago, a sculptor
transformed the biomass of the acanthus plant into a template for
architecture, using its stalk, leaves and flower as a model for the
shaft and volutes of the Corinthian column, we today must transform the
rigidities of architecture into the adaptations of nature.”
If the Seattle Justice Center is at the center of this new
mode/model, so is NBBJ’s latest contribution to Seattle’s skyline, the
Four Seasons Hotel. What the Miesian box was to the ’60s, the Four
Seasons is to the ’00s. It is the New Virtue.
But more than that: It is the Seattlest building that has been made
on an NBBJ scale. The Four Seasons is on First Avenue, nearly completed
(scheduled to open in late summer), and across the street from the
Allied Works–designed extension of Seattle Art Museum.
(Washington Mutual’s new and high-tech headquarters was also designed
by NBBJ.)
What makes the new Four Seasons more local than, say, the Seattle
Justice Center, or the United States Federal Courthouse, one of NBBJ’s
least impressive works (though the entrance on the south side has its
moments), is that the Four Seasons goes beyond green virtues and
activates virtues, codes, and concepts specific to this city. The
Seattle Justice Center is about an international program or ideal; the
Four Seasons Hotel is about a local agenda. The hotel has more to do
with Freeway Park than with any other luxury towers of its size
(310,000-square-feet, 21 stories) and expense ($100-plus million).
Now that we have arrived at the door of this article, let us enter
the core: The principle of the design is to incorporate the themes of
nature into the colors and textures of the building itself. Here we
have, as with Lawrence Halprin and Angela Danadjieva’s 1976 Freeway
Park—the first work to activate in a large way this
coding/meaning-making system in our city—the blending of the new
and the past, the wild and the man-made, the tree and the concrete, the
outside and the inside, the mountains and the buildings.
“The building is designed to bridge Seattle’s waterfront with the
‘mountains,’ or large buildings behind the development, as well as play
a unifying architectural role in the neighborhood,” design principal
Roxanne Williams told Business Wire.
The Four Seasons is not a bridge but a collapsed concentration of
all of these values and codes into one site, representing the city as
“a flower of geography,” as Jonathan Raban described Seattle, using the
words of Henry James. “With mountain ranges front and back, puddled
with lakes, and squatting on a reach of sea a hundred fathoms deep,
Seattle is up to its ears in nature….”
The Four Seasons is colored like a forest—muddy, barky, leafy.
The mud color dominates the middle-to-upper parts; the concrete core
looks like bark; the green leaves are made of glass. The effect of the
coloring is that when you walk into the area on First Avenue that
falls, toward dusk, under the building’s shadow, it’s as if you are not
in the middle of a big city but have suddenly come across the border of
a deep and dark wood. The shadow has the same qualities, tones, and
mood as a forest’s shadow. The effect is unsettling; you lose your
senses of place and time. And when you find them again, when you
realize that you are standing in one of the most urban blocks in the
state of Washington, you stabilize the effect (nature) and the reality
(urban) as one. It is this result—this one—that is
our city’s idea of itself, its geography, and its virtues. 
