01 Mar New apartment building planned for 167 S Washington

A few weeks ago, Urban Visions and Olson Kundig Architects hosted a design charrette for the plot of land at 167 S Washington St (directly south of Fuel and adjacent to McCoy’s firehouse).

The backgrounds of participants in the charrette consisted mostly of people who currently lived and worked in Seattle or who have lived in a downtown urban setting. Although I was the only resident of Pioneer Square, there were many others who worked in the neighborhood, or who had fixed opinions of what they would look for if they were willing to move to Pioneer Square.

A questionnaire for the project focused mainly on very small units (100 SF – 300 SF) and a concept of communal spaces (kitchen, bathrooms, living rooms, artist space, etc.), but Urban Visions says that that is not necessarily their focus for the space.

Although it will definitely be apartment living, Urban Visions are keeping their options open. Feedback from the group didn’t seem to be in favor of communal spaces, due to a number of factors, including cost, what spaces people would be willing to share, and control over the people you would be sharing them with.

Here is a statement from Broderick Smith, VP of Urban Visions:

We’d like to create a unique, creative building to help activate the square and Occidental park. Greg selected Tom [Kundig] as his architect not only because of Tom’s amazing talents but because he really understands the dynamics of ‘The Square’ (his office is just south of this site).

In such a unique neighborhood, it is really important that we do our due diligence and understand what the market wants here. In our opinion, community feedback is priceless (which is why we held the charrette and why we will hold more with community members along the way).

Ultimately we like market rate housing at this location; like with our 200 Occidental project, we want to add more people to the community, more eyes on the streets, more shoppers etc. I think the ‘add more residents to Pioneer Square’ concept makes sense to everyone by now.

Although the site is small and wouldn’t be adding a ton of new market rate units to the neighborhood, we will take all we can get and I look forward to seeing the design as the project moves forward.