History

The Exchange Building’s origins are inseparable from the economic ambitions of Seattle in the 1920s. The city’s boosters had long sought to establish a financial infrastructure that could rival San Francisco’s dominance of the Pacific Coast economy. A dedicated home for the Seattle Stock Exchange — housed in a building that announced the seriousness of Seattle’s financial community through the prestige of its architecture — was the clearest possible statement of those ambitions. John Graham, the English-born architect whose earlier commissions in Seattle had included the city’s leading department stores, was the natural choice for a building that had to project stability and modernity in equal measure.

The building was completed in 1930, at the threshold of the Great Depression, and the timing tested the resilience of its original program. The Seattle Stock Exchange, like financial exchanges across the country, contracted sharply in the early 1930s. But the building itself, with its roster of early tenants that included General Electric, Standard Oil, Edison Lamp Works, and Underwriters Laboratories, survived the Depression decade intact — proof that Graham’s design had correctly calculated the mid-range of the Seattle commercial market rather than the speculative high end. The building went on to house Pacific Northwest Bell and King County Metro before becoming the home of a new generation of professional services firms including Slalom Consulting, Deloitte Digital, and Nuance Communications. Its designation as a Seattle Landmark in 1990 formalized what the market had already established: the Exchange Building was one of the essential Art Deco towers of the Pacific Northwest.