Wells Fargo Center

Wells Fargo Center is a skyscraper in Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington. Formerly named First Interstate Center when completed 36 years ago in 1983, the 47-story, 574-foot (175 m) tower is now the ninth-tallest building in the city, and has 24 elevators and 941,000 square feet (87,400 m²) of rentable space. The design work was done by The McKinley Architects, and it was owned by Chicago-based EQ Office.

In 2013, the building was purchased by Canada's Ivanhoé Cambridge from Beacon Capital Partners of Boston. The building was renamed after First Interstate Bancorp was taken over by Wells Fargo in 1996.

The exterior façade Wells Fargo Center is composed of a six-sided, steel-framed tower that features a combination of tinted continuous double-glazed glass and polished spring rose granite panels. As is common with buildings in downtown Seattle, the Wells Fargo Center rests on a slope. The eastern entrance facing Third Avenue is slightly more than two stories higher than the Western side facing Second Avenue. On the west side, the building has a public hill-climb on two flights of outdoor escalators that were encased in clear tubes until 2006 when they were updated with a simpler, yet more modern glass roof. The building has three levels of outdoor plazas.

The site was previously occupied by the 12-story Olympic National Life building, which was demolished by implosion on the morning of Sunday, February 28, 1982. It was the first demolition by implosion in downtown Seattle. One of the city's first steel skyscrapers, it was built in 1906 and was also known as the American Savings Bank and the Empire Building.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "Wells Fargo Center (Seattle)" and modified on July 23, 2019 according to the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.