Weyerhaeuser Headquarters

The Weyerhaeuser Headquarters was designed by the architect Edward Charles Bassett of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for the timber and forest products company, completed in 1971 on a wooded site in Federal Way, Washington. Rather than a conventional office tower, Bassett designed a long, low, terraced structure roughly a quarter mile in length that steps down a hillside in a series of setback floors, deliberately kept low enough to sit beneath the surrounding tree line so the building would not dominate its forested setting. The landscape architect Peter Walker designed the grounds around the building, including a created lake and extensive plantings intended to make the building read as an extension of the managed forest landscape the company itself specialized in. Its long horizontal profile and hillside terracing were widely influential on later corporate campus design seeking to minimize a building's visual footprint on a natural site. The American Institute of Architects recognized the headquarters with its Twenty-Five Year Award in 2001.