A striking skyscraper concept for downtown Seattle has been making the rounds again a slender supertall tower with a massive garden carved right into its middle, hundreds of feet above the street. Here’s the full story on where this design came from, what it actually proposes, and where things stand today.
Seattle Tower, designed by New York firm ODA.
The project, simply named Seattle Tower, comes from ODA, a New York City-based architecture firm known for pushing the boundaries of high-rise living. Rather than the typical sealed glass tower, ODA’s design carves a dramatic void through the center of the building, creating an open-air courtyard roughly halfway up its height. On all four sides, the tower’s gridded white facade opens into an irregular cutout, revealing the garden within and letting it breathe with the surrounding air.
Proposed at 1,185 feet (361 meters), the tower would have placed it among the tallest buildings on the West Coast taller than London’s Shard and just shy of some of the supertalls rising in New York and Asia.
A closer look at the central cutout that would house the tower’s sky garden.
The centerpiece of the design is the elevated courtyard itself envisioned as a shared amenity space filled with trees, greenery, and seating, styled to echo the natural topography of the Pacific Northwest. Renderings show couches, benches, and lounging areas tucked among the plantings, with tiered platforms wrapping around the open space to offer multiple vantage points.
From up there, residents would get sweeping views toward Mount Rainier and Puget Sound turning what’s normally wasted structural space in a skyscraper into a literal park in the sky. ODA’s founder, Eran Chen, has said the idea was about giving city dwellers a way to step outside without ever leaving their building, rather than simply looking at nature through a window.
Renderings show a furnished garden deck designed for residents to gather and relax.
Below and above the garden void, the tower was designed to hold 1,080 residential units, with retail space, parking, and co-working areas planned for the lower floors. The building was designed for developer Crescent Heights, a Miami-based firm, for a site in downtown Seattle. Its slim, gridded white facade marked by evenly spaced rectangular windows was designed to make the tower feel more like a piece of sculpture than a standard high-rise block.
The tower’s slender, gridded facade, with the central garden void visible partway up its height.
This design was originally unveiled back in 2020, and it has not broken ground. ODA’s own project portfolio still lists Seattle Tower under “Idea” status, meaning it remains a conceptual proposal rather than an active construction project. There’s been no reported city approval, funding announcement, or updated timeline since the design was first revealed.
It’s also worth noting that Crescent Heights has pursued other supertall proposals for downtown Seattle over the years including an earlier, separate project called “4/C” at 4th and Columbia that were scaled back or stalled amid FAA height restrictions and financing hurdles. It’s a reminder that ambitious skyscraper concepts in Seattle often take years, if they get built at all.
Still, as a piece of architectural vision for what a supertall tower in Seattle could look like one that treats outdoor space as essential rather than optional Seattle Tower remains one of the most striking proposals ever put forward for the city’s skyline.
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