Art Deco Delights -- Seattle's 1920S Skyscrapers Were Inspired By Nature

THE UPCOMING CLOSURE OF THE downtown Seattle Woolworth's has brought photographs of the colorful terra-cotta department store into print. This Art Deco building, with its corner tower and familiar signage, has been a landmark at Third Avenue and Pike Street since 1940. The largest Woolworth's on the West Coast when it was built and proclaimed to be "the largest and best equipped Woolworth store in the nation," it also was the swan song of a building style that flourished internationally between the world wars.

In the 1920s, Seattle skyscrapers, clubs and retail buildings were designed and built to compete with those back East - no surprise considering that the original settlers had called their inhospitable settlement "New York, Alki." While many of these new buildings bore the traditional appearance of Greco Roman and Renaissance models, some were suitably up-to-date.

During the 1960s, these buildings began to be dubbed Art Deco. The name was a play on the Exposition des Arts Decoritifs held in Paris in 1925. The interiors, furnishings, lighting and textiles displayed at the exposition were widely published, and the American designer - like a kid in a candy store - suddenly saw a multitude of new decorative options. Art Deco responded to the pulse of the jazz age with vibrant geometric and floral forms in bold and vivid colors. Architects combined modern structural advances with a lively catalog of organic designs that expressed the power and rhythm of 20th-century America.

While borrowing freely from the French decorative art vocabulary popularized by the Exposition, Seattle architects also incorporated distinct Pacific Northwest images. Notable among these motifs were water, mountains, evergreen trees, animals and plants that would have been recognizable to residents of the region. Unique to these buildings was the application of Northwest Coast Indian art and Pacific Rim cultural references, which were interpreted by local sculptors and crafts people in glass, metal, plaster, stone and terra cotta. They distinguish Seattle's Art Deco buildings from others built elsewhere.

The Seattle Tower (originally called the Northern Life Tower) at Third Avenue and University Street is the best example of such local adaptation. The president of the Northern Life Insurance Company wanted a building with "lofty aspirations, strength, durability and solidity." In 1928, the firm of Albertson, Wilson and Richardson responded with a 27-story tower suggestive of the rock masses and spires of the nearby mountain ranges.

A.H. Albertson described the imagery of the building: "The building was conceived as rising out of the ground, not as sitting traditionally upon the surface - as a part of the earth rather than a thing apart from it. The piers start below the ground and, rising uninterrupted, shoot slick and clean to their consummation. The colors are earthy-like natural earth and rock color."

The sharp gradations in color values of the many bodies of water within the city and the contrasting whiteness of snow-capped Mount Rainier with the deep evergreen forests and ground colors influenced the firm to select four main color groups of brick and mix them in varying proportions. The resulting facade ranges from iron ore at the bottom to a light tan at the top, finished with lighter-toned terra-cotta caps that recall snow-capped rock masses and spires.

It was a visible symbol of mountains and canyons - a rugged, cool and powerful urban landscape that continually changed its expression with the hours of the day. For lead designer Joseph W. Wilson, the opportunity to sculpt a mountain was a natural outgrowth of his interests. He had grown up in the prairie, and loved Pacific Northwest mountains, so much so that in 1910 he and his fiancee tied the knot on the slopes of Mount Rainier.

The imagery of the mountain continued inside the building. The lobby was conceived as a tunnel carved out of solid rock, the side walls polished, the floor worn smooth, and the ceiling "decorated as a civilized caveman might do it." The marble walls, incised bronze panels and gilt ceiling decorations in low-relief abstract patterns combine references to Northwest Coast Indian feather, textile and painted motifs, repeated use of the evergreen tree and water images, and references to Mayan, Asian and Pacific Oceanic cultures.

In case the casual observer missed these references, a relief map at the rear of the lobby represented the Pacific Rim of nations with the famous quote, "Westward, the course of Empire takes its way." While a Spanish mission represents Southern California, it is the setback skyscraper Northern Life Tower that soars proudly up from the Pacific Northwest corner of America, with a steamship leaving port for the Orient.

The Exchange Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street also offers up a cornucopia of Pacific Northwest imagery. The second tallest reinforced concrete structure in the U.S. when it was constructed in 1929, ironically it opened its doors as a regional stock and commodities exchange on the eve of the stock market crash.

This 23-story building's exterior is decorated and capped with stylized floral ornament borrowed from contemporary French decorative art. However, John Graham Company also created ornamental reliefs in cast stone, bronze, plaster, and sandblasted wood that represented the Washington homegrown produce and commodities. Wheat, grapes, peaches, tulips, roses and wildflowers appear at every turn.

The Second Avenue entrance lobby is one of Seattle's most theatrical experiences. The gilt plaster diamond and triangle reliefs of the ceiling, set off by the curving black marble and bronze elevator bays, lend an ambiance of enchantment and drama more in keeping with King Tut's treasury than with a modern-day office building.

These two buildings symbolized the new century and did it with boldness and vision. Architects, engineers, artists, sculptors, stonemasons and metal, ceramic and glass crafts people merged their individual talents for the greater ensemble. Money was spent to exploit their dramatic possibilities, even if the principal intent was the familiar one of filling space with tenants. These designs provided urban America with some of its finest and most visible public art.

Lawrence Kreisman, coordinator of "Viewpoints" Seattle Architecture Tours, was a presenter at the Second World Congresson Art Deco in Perth, Western Australia, in October. Greg Gilbert and Barry Wong are Seattle Times photographers.