The Seattle Tower, originally known as the Northern Life Tower, is a 27-story

skyscraper A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources currently define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition. Skyscrapers are very tall high-ris ...

in downtown

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, Washington. The building is located on 1218 Third Avenue and is known as Seattle's first

art-deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the United ...

tower. Its distinctive,

ziggurat A ziggurat (; Cuneiform: 𒅆𒂍𒉪, Akkadian: ', D-stem of ' 'to protrude, to build high', cognate with other Semitic languages like Hebrew ''zaqar'' (זָקַר) 'protrude') is a type of massive structure built in ancient Mesopotamia. It has ...

exterior is clad in 33 shades of brick designed to effect a

gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p is the "direction and rate of fastest increase". If the gradi ...

which lightens from the bottom to the top of the building. This is said to have been inspired by local rock formations. According to the US National Park Service website: The building was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1975 and is also a designated city landmark.Landmarks Alphabetical Listing for S
, Individual Landmarks, Department of Neighborhoods, City of Seattle. Accessed 28 December 2007. Image:Seattle Northern Life 01.jpg, Image:Seattle Northern Life 02.jpg, Image:Seattle Northern Life 06A.jpg,

References

External links

Seattle Tower
middle 20 minutes of a one-hour broadcast from KUOW, Seattle. An audio tour of the building and its history. {{National Register of Historic Places 1920s architecture in the United States Art Deco architecture in Washington (state) Downtown Seattle National Register of Historic Places in Seattle Office buildings completed in 1929 Office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Washington (state) Skyscraper office buildings in Seattle