Seattle Art Museum (downtown building)

Scott Brown was principal-in-charge on this commission alongside Venturi, the firm's first major museum since the Sainsbury Wing competition win five years earlier. The building fills an awkward, steeply sloped downtown block with a limestone-clad volume whose street name is carved directly into the stone in oversized letters — SEATTLE ART — a gesture the firm had already tested at Guild House and one that treats the facade as a billboard rather than a temple front. Striped terracotta-and-stone arches, borrowed from the ornamental vocabulary of the city's older commercial buildings, frame the entrances below a bank of glazing that steps back from the street. Inside, the sculptural main stair — nicknamed the Art Ladder — climbs through the full height of the building past a monumental grand staircase lined with historic artefacts. It opened on 5 December 1991 at a cost of about $62 million, replacing cramped quarters in the 1933 Volunteer Park building (since renamed the Seattle Asian Art Museum), and was more than doubled in size by a 2007 expansion designed by Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works Architecture.