A Seattle Hines Skyscraper Goes LEED

One of Seattle's more anonymous skyscrapers has a reason to make some noise.  The cumbersomely-named Bank of America Fifth Avenue Plaza has been awarded LEED Gold certification.  The entire press release from Hines follows:

Amazon.com Phase One Completed

Seattle Daily Photo notes that the first phase of the new Amazon.com campus in Seattle's Lake Union neighborhood has been completed.  We've been following the project off and on mostly because of the way it's already helped transform a formerly industrial area of the city into a exploding residential neighborhood.

You can see the completed portion on SDP here.

And here are a couple of our photographs of the project in progress:

Animation: Seattle's Next Big Earthquake

The Washington State Department of Transportation wants to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct.  If you don't live in the Northwest, you may not be certain exactly what this is.

If you've ever been a tourist in Seattle, you'll remember it as the triple-decker street that separates downtown from the water.  You go under it when you go to the ferry or the aquarium or any of the other attractions on Elliott Bay.

WSDOT is worried about the viaduct collapsing in the event of an earthquake.  We all remember from the last big one in San Francisco what happened when a double-decker roadway failed.

It illustrate the possibilities, the people in Washington have put together a very informative, and visually gripping, animation showing what might happen if there was another earthquake about the same size as the last big one to hit Seattle.

It's really good stuff