Space Needle and Smith Tower are visible icons and freely depicted as architecture
— — the old skyscraper and the new fairground tower in one frame.
Not only on a wall.
“Two Seattle icons in one composition. Smith Tower, built in 1914 in Pioneer Square, was the tallest building west of the Mississippi for almost half a century. The Space Needle, built for the 1962 World's Fair, came forty-eight years later and a mile north. They share the city's air now, each a marker of a different Seattle.
Space Needle and Smith Tower are visible icons and freely depicted as architecture, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Smith Tower stands in Pioneer Square, at 506 Second Avenue, and rises 484 feet from sidewalk to pyramid. When it opened in 1914 it was the fourth-tallest building in the world. The Space Needle rises 605 feet at Seattle Center in Lower Queen Anne, opened in 1962 for the Century 21 World's Fair. The two structures sit about 1.5 miles apart along the city's waterfront edge, with the modern downtown skyline filling the distance between them. Both are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Smith Tower is steel-frame clad in terra-cotta and granite, in the neoclassical style typical of early-twentieth-century American skyscrapers. Its observation level, the Chinese Room on the thirty-fifth floor, retains its original carved blackwood furniture, gifted by the last Empress of China in 1914. The Space Needle is a different argument entirely — a tripod of steel painted Galaxy Gold and Astronaut White, with a saucer-shaped tophouse that nodded to the Space Age the year John Glenn orbited the Earth. Two centuries of architecture in one skyline.
Smith Tower's observatory is open daily. The original brass-fitted manually operated elevators still climb to the Chinese Room, which doubles as a bar with views over Pioneer Square and Elliott Bay. The Space Needle observation deck and rotating glass floor at Seattle Center are reached by the Seattle Monorail from Westlake station, a two-minute ride from downtown. The two can be paired in a single afternoon: Pioneer Square in the early light, the Needle for sunset over Puget Sound.