Dexter Yard

Avoiding another anonymous glass box was the starting point for Dexter Yard. The compact through-block site sits between South Lake Union’s innovation corridor and the residential Dexter Avenue ridge, with flight-path limits, contaminated soils, steep topography, and smaller-than-typical floor plates shaping the massing. Those constraints produced two 14-story life sciences and office towers with 22,000-square-foot plates, a porous ground plane, and a pedestrian connection that pulls movement through the block rather than around it. The ground plane is the project’s civic move. Instead of treating the base as a pair of corporate lobbies, the design carves out a through-block passage, plazas, outdoor rooms, and a curated mix of retail and social uses. At its center, the semi-conditioned Field House works as a flexible anchor for tenants and the neighborhood, supporting basketball, yoga, company events, movie nights, lectures, makers markets, and other community programs. A beer hall, coffee pavilion, food hall, speakeasy, gaming lounge, outdoor seating, and conference spaces extend that activity across the site, turning the block into a public sequence rather than a sealed workplace campus. The material language draws from South Lake Union’s warehouse, sawmill, and factory history without relying on nostalgia. Brick podiums, steel channels, deep window bays, exposed bracing, and a high-performance curtain wall give the towers depth and shadow while breaking down their scale. Where zoning called for façade modulation, the design used articulation instead: an 11-inch-deep woven curtain wall of projecting frames, shadow boxes, varied mullion depths, and inset glazing that shifts with daylight. Dexter Yard demonstrates that a dense workplace district can still have a finer grain, contributing streets, thresholds, and shared rooms back to the city.