UW Tacoma

I love the way the UW Tacoma campus has built itself around the historic legacy of its neighborhood. This area along Pacific, across from the old Union Station, used to consist of light industrial facilities and warehousing. The buildings stair stepped up the hill, cross-crossed by the rail line that served them.

The University of Washington has remodeled many of the old buildings, turning the spaces into classrooms and offices and labs. They've left much of the old structure - the old beams, the windows, the brick facings - but added atriums and new materials and modern era utilities. And they've done a wonderful job with the spaces between the buildings, including the diagonal that follows the old tracks and a great terraced series of steps that mark the core route through campus.

Here's some photos from a few years ago, taken on the other side of Pacific down towards the Foss Waterway.

Tacoma: February 2011