A Seattle Skyscraper’s Rise Helps Shatter a Glass Ceiling

Julia Nagele was Sketching in the Pantheon when a stranger sat down next to her. Nagele did not notice it at first; The architecture student got lost under the famous concrete dome of the Roman miracle on a commission for her master’s degree at the University of Maryland. But the woman next to her started a conversation anyway. It turned out that they were both American. They chatted for a while before going their separate ways. Have a good life, Nagele recalls.

Two weeks later, Nagele visited Florence with her study abroad group. She woke up early one morning to wander around the city alone and stop in a piazza. In the square she heard her name being called. It was the woman again – Ann. “And we’ve been together ever since,” says Nagele almost 25 years after meeting her wife for the first time.

The Seattle-based architect describes the genesis of their marriage as coincidental, a coincidence that cities have a knack for conjuring – in the hustle and bustle of their parks, their wagons and, as Nagele notes, their buildings. As director of architectural design at Hewitt, she likes to create spaces for unplanned connections where people and ideas can intersect.

One of their most recent projects was completed at an inconvenient time for such crossings. In October, after more than three years of construction and several other planning work, the builders completed work on the Emerald, a 40-story apartment tower that rises above Pike Place Market. The high-rise structure will welcome residents by the end of this month or early next year, with the pandemic-induced public health restrictions still in full effect. No confabia in the common area, no sparks on the fireplace. It’s not the kind of rollout Nagele could ever have envisioned as she led the sleek skyscraper’s exterior design, but she’s confident that the social, detached condominium sales and city life are only temporary. “I think that will pass,” she says.

What will remain is a building that symbolizes more than the city’s growing appeal to well-heeled shoppers across the country and around the world, a change Nagele has seen since arriving in Seattle in the winter of 1997. The architect is now one of a small group of women in the world who direct the exterior design of such a tall tower and associate with lights like Jeanne Gang in Chicago and Lu Wenyu in Hangzhou, China. According to Daniel Safarik, editor-in-chief of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Living, given the collaborative nature of design and construction and some historical undervaluation, there is no point in determining exactly how many women have controlled the shape of a skyscraper. But it is safe to say that it is rare. “There are very few of us who do such projects,” says Nagele.

Nagele is now used to going to meetings full of men. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a hostile environment or anything like that,” she says. “But I think there is something that I at least think about, and that leads me to be super prepared and to have the particularly high expectations of our team, to be super prepared.”

At Hewitt, where she started in 2011 and has since worked on a number of apartment complexes and other urban structures, she stresses that she explores various options for a project “rigorously and without prejudice”. The Emerald at 121 Stewart Street required working in a tight space where downtown and Belltown converge and how many high-rise projects are exchanged between different parties (the developer is Daniels Create World Seattle and Create World Real Estate in Bellevue) Polaris Pacific takes care of about sales and marketing of the building.

Nagele has teamed up with Susan Marinello of Susan Marinello Interiors to create indoor and outdoor spaces that use and showcase the natural surroundings of the building. In the Olympic room on the roof, Nagele advocated an unadorned glass edge that would allow residents to look out over Elliott Bay and the contours of distant mountains or down to Pike Place Market.

The tourists walking around below can look up and see a future home. During a virtual tour, Polaris Pacific sales director Henry Lee said that buyers from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and several cities on the east coast have bought some of the building’s 262 units. Others in the Puget Sound area have simply looked to upgrade their current quarantine neighborhoods.

Even so, the Emerald is not immune to the plight of the downtown condominium market during the pandemic. In early December, Lee said the building sold 40 percent of that living space, which is typically between one and three bedrooms and costs between $ 500,000 and $ 3 million (its penthouses can cost nearly $ 11 million). The amenities common to many luxury buildings will be limited when residents start unpacking boxes. Reservations are required for the yoga and gym on the third floor, as well as a common room on the top floor. Elevator rides are limited to four people.

Nagele has turned to other projects, including another tower near Pike Place Market that is said to be even taller than the emerald. But she wants the building to serve one of the purposes of an apartment building: to help more people socialize. While ancient churches and squares can distinguish European cities, US skyscrapers, like them or not, denote urban activity. It is important to Nagele that they honor their wider homeland. “They are part of the urban fabric.”