On a clear day in Seattle—and, yes, there is such a thing—the view from a

new 14,000-square-foot plaza to the west of the iconic Pike Place Market is
so wide, you have to turn your head to take it all in: the derricks, shipping
piers, warehouses, and giant Ferris wheel, bustling Elliott Bay, the islands of
Puget Sound, and, in the northwest distance, the white-capped peaks of the
Olympic Mountains. Perched on a hill rising steeply from the water, the plaza
forms part of the Miller Hull Partnership’s mixed-use expansion of the 110-
year-old market, a beloved institution that anchors a vibrant historic district.
Completed last spring, MarketFront (as the project is called)—developed by
a nonprofit, with the city providing the land and a grant covering about half
the funding—forms a crucial node in reconnecting the urban core to its
revitalizing waterfront.

The renaissance is being driven by James Corner Field Operations and the
master plan the firm has developed for the city’s central waterfront, a 1¼-
mile stretch from Pioneer Square to Belltown. The multiyear plan, now under
way, calls for the removal of an elevated six-lane highway, the replacement
of the seawall, and the creation or improvement of public spaces, multimodal
streets, and new connections between central city neighborhoods and Elliott
Bay. MarketFront is among the most significant of these new links. The
project’s terraced civic spaces are united with a broad switchback
promenade that will ultimately ramp down to the waterfront, stitching
together part of the highway’s decades-long rip in Seattle’s urban fabric.

The challenge of the project—“the most daunting assignment I’ve had in 40-
plus years,” says David Miller, founding partner at Seattle-based Miller Hull—
was to find a formal and material language for the landmark site that would
build on the market district’s historic character while creating a
contemporary solution. Like many waterfront developments, the design for
the 210,000-square-foot parcel (a former parking lot where a municipal
market building burned down decades ago) evolved in a context of complex
demands and intense public scrutiny.

MarketFront’s form and expression respond to the steepness of the site, key
views and connections, local design guidelines, material cues from the
streetscape, technical obstacles (including an active train tunnel running
diagonally beneath the site), and extensive input from some 70—often
heated—public meetings. The design addresses these diverse and
complicated influences with an aesthetic that is immediately recognizable as
Miller Hull’s: a rational, structurally expressive building, executed in simple
materials, that sets up a mutually reinforcing relationship with its Pacific
Northwest setting; the landscape—city, mountains, sea—is more
comprehensible because the building is here, and the building only really
makes sense in the context of the landscape.

In addition to its public spaces—the viewing plaza, wide seating steps, and
multi-path promenade—MarketFront provides two levels of retail space and
40 units of low-income-seniors’ housing atop four levels of buried parking.
For the commercial and civic components, a concrete-frame structure and
board-formed concrete base elements are complemented with a heavy
timber structure of glulams made from sustainably harvested lumber; the
timbers are joined with steel connectors, and spanned with structural
wooden decking. On the water-facing facades, expanses of aluminumframed
glazing are backed with vertical timber stiffeners to resist heavy wind loads.

At the upper level, a pavilion consisting of a lightweight steel frame

supporting a wood-soffited canopy is fronted with glazed garage doors that
can be raised or lowered to shelter open-air vendor stalls while maintaining
views from the original market behind. The pavilion provides a well-
proportioned street edge for Western Avenue to the east, and helps to
animate the viewing plaza on MarketFront’s western, waterfront side.

To the south, the tiered massing of senior housing forms a separate domain,
while corrugated-steel cladding, aluminum-mullioned glazing, and tan-
colored spandrels that pick up on the hues of the old market provide visual
continuity with the rest of the complex.

If there’s a missed opportunity in the project, it’s the pedestrian bridge that
spans Western Avenue between the original market and the new extension.
A heritage designation protects the bridge’s mid-1980s enclosure designed
by James Cutler, so instead of integrating it into MarketFront and highlighting
its role as the first link in a magnificent new promenade, Miller Hull was able
to do little more than add some doors in the facade facing MarketFront.

Even on a winter weekday morning, when no vendors are using the upper-
level pavilion, a few visitors sit along its stepped edge or lean against the
galvanized-steel guardrail of the plaza, enjoying the view. Boats beetle
across the water. Behind, the city thrums. There’s a liveliness to the
architecture itself, with its bold structure and tactile materials, and the planks
of the platform’s wood decking give the expanse a comfortable scale.
Suspended within the guardrail’s chain link panels, hundreds of small metal
disks inscribed with donors’ names are flashing and winking in the sun,
silently cheering, placeholders for the crowds that will enjoy Seattle’s newest
civic space for generations to come