Seattle Historical Sites

This building was built in or around 1953. Early on, the Automatic Sprinkler Company owned it. The lower wing was designed as an office wing, while the taller wing was designed as warehouse. The juxtaposition of the more rectilinear lower wing with the curved warehouse wing is a good, if not striking mid-Twentieth Century Modernist solution to the problem of combining office space with warehouse space. Although glazing at the lower level may have been replaced and the doorway moved to a more central location, the alteration seems relatively minor and compatible with the original design. The building is now occupied by a company called Spud!

This building is rectangular in plan. Its original structure includes both concrete and wood frame exterior walls. The front portion of the plan consists primarily of a low wing topped by a flat roof with a continuous overhang. The front wall of this wing consists of low solid wall, topped by almost continuous windows in aluminum frames, organized around a main glazed entry. There is also a slightly taller wing to the west of this, which presents a fluted concrete wall with no openings. Set back from the lower wing, the curved roof of a taller warehouse wing, roughly 20 feet in height, rises above. Its south elevation presents a curved shape filled with glazing, with mullions more or less corresponding to the bays of the lower wing below. The truss members of the bow truss inside the structure are also partially visible. The overhang of the lower wing extends onto the addition to the east, which technically is located on a different parcel.  The addition was made in 1986. Despite its present existence, the sense of the original building has been maintained.