Seattle Historical Sites

Summary for 1800 Terry AVE / Parcel ID 0660001580 / Inv #

Historic Name: King County Medical Services Common Name: 1800 Terry Avenue Style: Modern - Brutalism Neighborhood: Denny Triangle Built By: Year Built: 1964   Significance This is a Modernist building designed in the Brutalist style by the architecture firm of Grant Copeland Chervenak and Associates for the King County Medical Services Corporation. The structural engineers were Harvey Dodd & Associates and the mechanical engineers, Kane & Ervin. The building is a typical office building of its time. Despite the somewhat ambitious use of precast panels for the building exterior, the building is relatively modest in height, which makes it perhaps more typical of modern office buildings outside of urban Seattle. The building was completed in 1964 and the Seattle Chapter of the AIA granted it an Honor Award in 1965. The firm of Grant Copeland and Chervenak was founded in 1955 by Austin Grant, Douglas Copeland and Robert Chervenak. Austin Grant and Douglas Copeland both graduated from the University of Washington, in 1941 and 1938 respectively. The firm’s earlier works include the church of Christ the King in Bellevue (ca.1956), and Pilgrim Lutheran Church (ca. 1955). Particularly in the 1960s, Grant Copeland and Chervenak was a very well-known, award winning, Seattle firm. In 1964, it won an AIA Seattle Chapter Honor Award for the Hugo Winkenwerder Forest Science Laboratory (Forestry Building), designed in the Northwest Modernist idiom, and located on the University of Washington campus. It won the same award for Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, located in Everett, Washington, in 1969. The building originally served as a “medical center” for King County Medical Services, but appears to have mainly contained offices. It was later owned by Regence Blueshield until 2004. Currently, it appears to be vacant. It was built on the site of several small, frame commercial buildings dating from the 1900s.   Appearance This is a five story concrete building, with a partial basement level, as well as a mechanical penthouse. Its structure includes a grid pattern of concrete columns, which are cruciform in plan, as well as waffle slab floors, organized around a concrete service core. From the exterior, the building presents a recessed ground level, with an open southern plaza, where the grid of regularly spaced cruciform columns and the waffle slab floor construction is partially revealed. The plaza also includes a concrete fountain and a precast concrete planter. The plaza continues along the western side of the building. Here, the open area is considerably narrower and is bounded by a concrete retaining wall, with a long precast planter set on the inside of it. Above the ground level plaza, the building is distinguished by a box-like form, defined in plan by a rectangle of 149 feet by 119 feet and with four identically detailed elevations. The exterior walls of the box are made of precast concrete panel screens and include four levels of repeated and recessed, vertical window openings, which define a waffle-like pattern. Original drawings and a smooth depressed band between the third and fourth levels suggest that two levels of openings are included in each rectangular precast panel. The mechanical penthouse, set back from the parapet of the fifth floor, and also not that easily visible from the street, was originally designed with a smaller version of the standardized precast screens. Currently, the penthouse is clad with what appear to be metal screens with horizontal slats.

Detail for 1800 Terry AVE / Parcel ID 0660001580 / Inv #

Status: Yes - Inventory Classication: Building District Status: Cladding(s): Concrete, Glass - Curtain Wall, Glass - Glass Block, Other Foundation(s): Concrete - Poured Roof Type(s): Flat Roof Material(s): Asphalt/Composition Building Type: Health Care - Medical Business/Office Plan: Rectangular Structural System: Concrete - Poured No. of Stories: five Unit Theme(s): Architecture/Landscape Architecture, Health/Medicine, Science & Engineering Integrity Changes to Plan: Intact Changes to Original Cladding: Intact Changes to Windows: Slight Major Bibliographic References City of Seattle DCLU Microfilm Records. King County Tax Assessor Records, ca. 1932-1972. Marga Rose Hancock, “AIA Seattle Honor Awards: projects cited 1950- ,” database available at: http://www.aiaseattle.org/archive_honorawards_1950topresent.htm “Christ the King Church Exterior from rear, Bellevue, 1956,” explanatory notes on image in Dearborn Massar Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Washington. http://www.aiaseattle.org/archive_honorawards_1950topresent.htm

Photo collection for 1800 Terry AVE / Parcel ID 0660001580 / Inv #

Photo taken Mar 27, 2006