To retain the historic nature of the building, the design team had to build within the same envelope, although they were able to create more usable space within the structure by adding modern elements.
Photo courtesy the Port of Seattle

“Converting a 100-year-old-plus facility into a sophisticated—particularly an environmentally sustainable Living Building Challenge—building posed a lot of challenges we were excited about,” says Kyra Lise, the port’s director of real estate development. “It is the sort of vision the port has to continually modernize.”

With ground broken in May 2024 on the $37-million project, the port-owned building reached substantial completion in February, although work is ongoing at the site to wrap construction before tenant improvement requests are made. Washington Maritime Blue will lease it as a collaborative hub for a confluence of the maritime industry’s key stakeholders.

Located on Salmon Bay just east of the Ballard Locks in Seattle, the site is no more than 45 ft from in-use buildings on either side, giving crews a tight footprint to rehabilitate the structure, which was moved roughly 106 ft into the parking lot so crews could pound new piles and craft a fresh slab.

Crews reused the historic building’s envelope and timber but added a steel bracing system to meet seismic codes. The brace frame is now intertwined between existing wood trusses and columns.
Photo courtesy the Port of Seattle

From the jump, crews knew existing piers and piles were rotten. And with codes updated over the last 100 years, the port had to adopt the same footprint for the new structure, forcing the port to replace the piers and remediate the soils characterized as “black mayonnaise,” Lise says.

“We are in seismic design category D, the most difficult other than being right on a fault,” says Mike Jobes, principal at the Miller Hull Partnerships and design lead on the Maritime Innovation Center. “It is a major liquefaction zone. It is all fill. It wasn’t just repair the piles, it was replacing them.” That required lifting the structure, moving it and then taking on the piers and soil before moving the building back onto the new supports.

Moving the thin skeleton of the building—basically a wood truss roof system—proved precarious because of the building’s condition. Subcontractor D.B. Davis LLC had to jack and crib the building, place it on rollers and move it in tiny increments. Thanks to settling, crews had to true up the building and create a bracing system for cribbing and lifting to make sure it was level.

The design team reused every piece of wood within the historic site that wasn’t contaminated. Some of the pieces remained in their structural form or were merged with new construction to level the building. Some wood not part of the structural elements of the center were used as decking or for other features.
Photos courtesy Miller Hull

“When we took apart the building and took the skin off, we found the old structure,” says Kelly Purnell, Port of Seattle project manager. “We couldn’t see all of it, it was covered. Some of the columns had twisted almost 3 inches and some of the columns were just sitting on a block of nothing. We had to splice the columns to make them the same length, there was so much shift in how the building settled.”

The next tricky part was maintaining that level during the move. “It was an interesting challenge,” Purnell says. “As we moved it, it wasn’t a completely flat surface.” The entire site was settling on bad soils, and the building was moved inches at a time with constant adjustments to keep it level.

Engineers contemplated disassembly and reassembly, but with the joints in the trusses so old, there were concerns the structure wouldn’t fit back together. Moving it eliminated reassembly, which Jobes says “ended up being worth it.” Crews did remove two barn wings off the building and reassembled those to make the move of the primary structure more straightforward.

Located in a major soil liquefaction zone, repairing piles wasn’t the answer. Jobes says they replaced the existing piers with thirty-nine 24-in. steel piles sinking 90 ft in depth to support the structural concrete and rebar slab and cap that is up to 3 ft thick. “That slab is so robust it will stand after the apocalypse,” Jobes says. “It is an amazing foundation that took serious effort and cost.”

Driving the piles required depth. “What was described to us was the first 25 feet the piles would ooze down,” Jobes says. “It didn’t take any driving.”

To bring the building up to code, the design reused the historic wooden truss system and enhanced it with a new steel brace frame, alternating between existing wood trusses and columns and the new green steel. “There is a new structure woven in between the old structure,” Jobes says. “It is clear which is old and which is new. We essentially have a whole new building inside the existing building, almost a datascape of the changing seismic code.”

The reused materials help the building retain its historic character but also reduced the carbon impact of the project.
Photo courtesy the Port of Seattle

During the final move, Jobes says the structure was literally hanging from a crane—like a shirt on a hanger—and columns were different lengths because of the settling, requiring new column bases at variable heights.

In the end, the port kept the historic 15,693-gross-sq-ft envelope of the building, preserving the structure’s original dimensions.

Purnell says that dealing with the soils was always going to be tricky, with the timber piers rotting away and leaving voids in the site. While the team knew they would encounter plenty of soil-focused surprises, they weren’t prepared for discovering a 5,000-gallon riveted tank underground. “It still had old fuel in it from who knows what back in the day,” Purnell says. “It had to be remediated.” The team also ran across an archaeological find and settlement issues when working with the existing utilities.

“You name it, we found it out there,” Purnell says. “It was lots of whack-a-mole for a while there. What we had accounted as the biggest risk was known unknowns.”

The Maritime Innovation Center will serve as a hub of activity on the Seattle waterfront, offering a visible example of the merger of historic and modern elements.
Photo courtesy the Port of Seattle

Dealing with the old and adding the new didn’t even account for the LBC component of the project. Chris Hellstern, a sustainability director at Miller Hull Partnership with an expertise in the Living Building Challenge, says he’s proud of the way they reused the building. “The idea of being able to take a 110-year-old structure on a working waterfront and rehabilitate it is new for the Living Building Challenge,” he says. “It is the oldest renovation and first on a working waterfront.”

Hellstern says opting for a LBC project lined up with the port’s goals on energy and water targets while becoming the greenest port in North America. One of the key benefits was reusing existing building materials to reduce embodied carbon. The team welcomed old-school trades. Craftspeople reworked the mass timber from the old structure into hand-fabricated laminated timber decking. Jobes says that pretty much every piece of wood that wasn’t contaminated was reused in some fashion. An abandoned interior gantry built with timber was key for that, and parts of the old-growth timber was reclaimed as oversized benches for the inside of the building and served as bollards on the outside.

Arguably the most unique element brought by the LBC was having the building treat its own gray and black water on site. With Seattle’s already stringent energy codes, the port leveled up with an efficient envelope, a geothermal exchange system, photovoltaic panels and fully electric systems.

“I hope people take away that this type of building is possible today,” Hellstern says, noting that the biggest challenges weren’t related to the LBC and that even a risk-averse agency like a port can take on a project of this type. “It shows a pathway for so many other organizations across the country.”