A quasi-Gothic, Kengo Kuma and Associates-designed 40-story mixed-use skyscraper could be headed to downtown Seattle's Belltown neighborhood. 

The project, developed in collaboration with architects Ankrom Moisan, landscape architects Berger Partnership, and developer Pacific Virginia, will not only preserve the facade of the historic Bebb & Gould's Terminal Sales Annex building from 1915, but will also work to use the tower's massing, exterior treatments, and vertically-oriented "regulating lines" to "reinforce the strong Gothic and art deco heritage of Seattle’s downtown."

A design review submittal to the City of Seattle runs through a variety of options for how the tower's massing might shift to highlight and relate to the Annex. The proposals all share a common trait: The five-story Gothic Revival commercial structure will be preserved nearly in its entirety for the project, with the new building elements designed to wrap around and encase the boxy masonry structure. 

For this reason, rather than engaging in run-of-the-mill façadism, the architects are working to go one step further by radically reinterpreting the existing structure and repositioning elements of the building through a variety of approaches while absorbing its floor plates into their new tower. 

The approach is reflected in section as well as in plan. A preferred design features "telescoping" volumes that are setback from the lot line in conjunction with the geometries of the existing building. The concept helps to reveal the existing building while breaking up the tower's lower masses into volumes designed to mimic historical massing patterns from Seattle's Art Deco era. The design will create a small corner plaza that exposes a second face of the existing building, for example, with new elements tucked more modestly behind and around the Annex. 

The plan calls for converting the ground floor of the existing building into a pair of residential and hotel lobbies that feed into a third lobby dedicated to a co-working suite located higher up in the existing building. Other new spaces on the ground floor include a restaurant, elevator cores for the residential and hotel programs located in the bulk of the tower, and loading dock spaces. Hotel conference and co-working spaces will fill out the first four levels of the tower complex, with the bulk of the hotel's rooms located on floors five through 12. Mid-tower hotel amenity spaces will top the lower portion of the tower, while the remaining 27 stories will contain condominiums. 

Renderings for the project depict buff-colored vertical bands running up the length of the tower with an inset arcade and porte-cochere flanking the corner plaza. The project will include five below-ground parking levels, as well. A project timeline has not been released.