September 3, 2015

Amazon tweaks design for 4th block in SLU

Images by Graphite Design Group [enlarge]

The next design review meeting is Sept. 8 in City Hall.

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Next week architects from Graphite Design Group will show off their latest plans for an Amazon.com office complex at 2200 Seventh Ave.

A Seattle design review board will give its recommendations at a meeting scheduled for 5:30-8:30 p.m. Sept. 8 in Seattle City Hall's Bertha Landes Room.

The complex is planned for one of the four blocks Amazon is developing in the Denny Triangle. This block is bound by Seventh Avenue, Bell Street, Eighth Avenue and Blanchard Street.

The proposal is for a 24-story office tower on Bell and an eight-story mid-rise on Blanchard. There would be a total of 834,400 square feet of office space and 26,000 square feet of retail.

An alley on the site would be vacated and replaced with a zigzagging pedestrian path that leads between the buildings from Seventh to Eighth avenues.

Underground parking for 877 vehicles on four levels is also planned.

A skybridge would connect the buildings on the third and fourth floors.

Documents filed with the city show that the design has been significantly tweaked since the project's last design review in January.

Architects added one floor to the tower and removed a floor from the mid-rise. A plaza on Seventh Avenue was redesigned to make it more accessible, with fewer stairs and new hardscape areas that can be reached from the street.

New retail entries were added between the buildings, along with outdoor seating and landscaping, to make the space more inviting to pedestrians.

Other changes include removing a cantilevered element to allow more daylight into the pedestrian passage between the buildings.

Amazon has started construction on two of the Denny Triangle blocks, totaling about 2.2 million square feet of space. Plans for the third block are in flux as Amazon appears to be planning to build a distribution hub for its one-hour delivery service instead of a 1.1 million-square-foot office project.

The retail giant's existing campus in South Lake Union is 1.7 million square feet, and the company leases additional space in the neighborhood.