Seattle Modular Housing
Located in downtown Seattle adjacent to the Olympic Sculpture Park, the Western Avenue Multi-Family Residential project represents an early implementation of a cold-formed steel, locally fabricated modular building system authored by DF&A. The project advances a systems-based approach to residential construction, integrating design, fabrication, and assembly within a coordinated modular platform developed for scalability and regional deployment.
The building is conceived as both infrastructure and civic backdrop, engaging directly with its cultural and coastal context. Its massing is shaped to mediate view corridors toward Elliott Bay and the Seattle skyline while framing selective visual relationships to the Olympic Sculpture Park. The façade operates as a sculptural and performative system, calibrated to balance light, privacy, and environmental exposure while reinforcing the building’s role as an urban condition rather than an isolated object.
At grade, the project establishes a direct and active relationship with Western Avenue, supporting pedestrian engagement and reinforcing street-level continuity. Below grade, structured parking is integrated in a manner that minimizes its visual and spatial impact on the urban realm and adjacent park, remaining largely invisible from key pedestrian and civic viewpoints. Its presence is primarily experienced along Elliott Avenue and through a landscaped pedestrian connection between Western and Elliott Avenues, reinforcing permeability across the site.
A single rooftop level consolidates residential amenities and shared outdoor space, creating a focused communal environment with expansive views of the city and waterfront. This elevated condition provides a spatial counterpoint to the density below, offering light, air, and collective program within a clearly defined horizontal plane.
As a prototype, the project demonstrates how modular cold-formed steel systems can support both technical efficiency and architectural expression, while contributing meaningfully to the civic and landscape structure of a highly visible urban site. It positions industrialized construction not only as a method of delivery, but as a framework for producing contextual, adaptable, and publicly engaged urban architecture.
Our prototype hotel room for MiTek’s modular initiative reflects our passionate belief that modular technology should serve architectural design, not supersede it. Creativity and formal expression are still possible within the parameters of factory production; efficiency does not preclude beauty.
The challenge with this Manhattan project was as simple as it was daunting: build a modular hotel in one of the most tightly packed cities in the world—and make sure it doesn’t look “modular.”
