Waterfront
Marriott Hotel
Seattle, Washington
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Studies: Hotels > Waterfront Marriott Hotel
The $43 million Waterfront Marriott Hotel is an essential component of
the downtown Seattle revitalization plan “inviting back” the
public to the Port of Seattle as a place to live, work, and play. Opened
in 2003, the hotel plays a key role in providing improved public amenities,
employment opportunities, dwellings, and open space.
 One
of Seattle’s two waterfront hotels, this 8-story, 316,000-square-foot
facility, has three guest wings, and all 358 guestrooms overlook Elliott
Bay with magnificent views of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountain
range. Within walking distance of major attractions and shopping destinations,
the hotel features the 8,200-square-foot Grand Pacific Ballroom, an indoor/outdoor
swimming pool, a gourmet restaurant, retail space, and two underground
parking levels for 116 cars.
Panoramic views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains from an adjacent
public park on a sloped site limited the building height to 86 feet above
grade. The design team identified cast-in-place concrete as the only floor
system that could meet the floor height limit and squeeze the required
number of above-grade levels to make the project feasible. A post-tensioned
7-inch-thick flat plate provided an economical structural system that
achieved the necessary floor-to-floor clearance without blocking the park
views. Slabs are reinforced at supporting 18-inch columns with mild rebar
and stud-rails for added shear capacity. Half the guestrooms feature private
balconies achieved by cantilevering the post-tensioned slab.
 Concerned
with noise from the adjacent Burlington Northern railroad corridor, the
design team employed a 250-foot-long concrete shear wall cast along the
rail corridor. The wall provides acoustical separation from the noisy
railroad traffic and also serves as a natural fire barrier. This long
wall possessed very high relative stiffness, but KPFF engineers carefully
laid out the remaining shorter structural walls to mitigate any torsional
imbalance, while keeping the most effective guestroom layout. Typically
12 inches thick, the shear walls and boundary elements were carefully
detailed to provide ductile performance under earthquake and seismic loads.
A combination of concrete spread footings, mat foundations, and auger-cast
concrete piles anchored to reinforced concrete pile caps made up the column
and shear wall foundations. An economical alternative to steel piles,
concrete piles reduced serious noise and vibration concerns associated
with driving steel piles. The lowest level of the 2-story basement is
21 feet below grade and 15 feet below mean sea level. Alternative membrane
and waterproofing systems were considered to provide an effective integral
waterproofing system, but were determined to be uneconomical and required
excessive construction time. All below- grade construction and control
joints included sodium bentonite waterstops and a post-injectable grout
hose system to seal and waterproof.
 Approximately
17,000 cubic yards of concrete was used in construction with design strengths
from 3,000 to 6,000 psi. Higher strengths were used for post-tensioned
slabs and heavily loaded walls and columns. At each level, the individual
wings represented separate placement operations with a typical “pour-size”
of 12,000 square feet. The Seattle Waterfront Marriott hotel marks the
second application of the world’s heaviest concrete, originally
developed for radiation shielding at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
This 350-pound-per-cubic-foot heavyweight concrete provides a unique counterbalancing
system for elevator imposed uplift forces. This resulted from locating
elevator equipment in the basement instead of the roof. The exterior of
the hotel features 14,000 square feet of architectural precast concrete
panels and 25,000 square feet of patterned exposed concrete. The rooftop
“seascape” design was rendered with 47,000 colored concrete
and recycled glass pavers.
This durable concrete project, completed in 18 months, resulted in a
thriving neighborhood contributing to Seattle’s economic and cultural
vitality.
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| Owner (during development):
Marriott International, Washington, D.C.
Developer:
Wright Hotels and Frank Finneran & Co., Seattle
Architect:
FMSM Design Group, Albuquerque, N.M.
Architect (construction phase):
Jensen/Fey Architecture and Planning, Seattle
Structural Engineer:
KPFF Consulting Engineers, Seattle
Project management:
Sutor Consulting, Seattle
General contractor: Turner Construction
Co., Seattle
Interior designer: Banik-Cumby, Philadelphia
Designer (The Fish Club):
Duncan & Miller Design, Dallas
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