Core Design Team

Firm: Side x Side Architects

Gladys Ly-Au Young Side x Side Architects, Principal-in-Charge
John Kennedy Side x Side Architects, Project Architect
Myra Lara Side x Side Architects, Project Manager

Consultants/Collaborators

Sandro Kodama Quantum Consulting Engineers, Structural Engineer
Frank Unocic Quantum Consulting Engineers, Structural Engineer
Morgan Heater Ecotope, Mechanical Engineer
Katie Glore Ecotope, Mechanical Engineer
Aprille Balangue Travis Fitzmaurice Wartelle Balangue Engineers, Electrical Engineer
Dan Bruck Coffman Engineers, Principal Advisor, Acoustics

Project Narrative

The design of Station Space converts perennially unused space on the second floor of King Street Station into a vibrant creative hub for five cultural organizations serving youth. The 10,000 square-foot brick-lined hall, boarded up in the early 1960s, remained vacant and closed to the public for nearly 60 years until Station Space opened in 2023.

Station Space provides a transformational home for these organizations to thrive—for some, it is the first permanent location in their history. Five youth-centered tenants hold a 60-year lease: Totem Star, Rhapsody Project, Red Eagle Soaring, Jackson Street Music, and Wh!psmart. The long-term affordable rent provides financial stability for the tenants while the central location of King Street Station is key: the station, itself a transportation hub, is steps away from multimodal mass transit connections critical to attracting youth from across the region. The Cultural Space Agency, a mission-driven public development authority (PDA) dedicated to addressing pervasive racial inequity and the displacement of cultural spaces, acted in partnership with the City of Seattle as the community development partner for the project.

Three main creative spaces radiate from an undulating hemlock-clad central public hallway, known as the Anemone, accessed via the station’s ground-level Jackson Street plaza entry. Each tenant space is purpose-designed yet simple and flexible with minimal finishes. At strategic moments, the station’s bones shine through: concrete arches and steel columns are left raw and revealed, lending a sense of time, authentic grain, and patina.

Totem Star, a community of young recording artists building skills in music production and performance, holds the first space on the right of the hallway. The 2,000-square-foot studio includes four state-of-the-art recording rooms, a control room, and a lounge space. This new home—seven times larger than their previous space—allows youth to engage in songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering, live performance, and classes on the music industry. In the lounge, which includes a kitchenette, exposed I-beams create bench seating along the west-facing windows. The exposed vaulted ceilings lend a sense of the building’s historic charm and unique acoustics referred to as the “King Street Station Sound.”

Rhapsody Project, which empowers a community of youth and elder tradition bearers in styles ranging from Northwest Blues to Yiddish Music and Heritage, provides tools for creative entrepreneurship through workshops, music and dance classes, jam sessions, and concerts. Their 1,500-square-foot space, across from Totem Star, contains a main performance and gathering area that opens onto the public hallway via a ten-foot-tall pivot door. When open, the door allows performances to spill out into the hallway and invites passersby in. Rhapsody’s space also contains a luthier shop for repairing stringed instruments and a lounge and music library with a Roots-influenced vinyl record collection.

Red Eagle Soaring empowers American Indian and Alaska Native youth to express themselves with confidence and clarity through traditional and contemporary performing arts. The heart of their 1,600-square-foot space is a 30-seat black box theater equipped with a pipe grid ceiling for lighting and theatrical equipment, a continuous curtain, and window shutters that can completely darken the room. An easily adaptable space for plays, shows, and film projects, the back of the theater includes a control booth on a raised platform and a simple set workshop area, which can be cordoned off by the curtain during performances.

Down the corridor to the south are two office spaces: one for Jackson Street Music Program, an experiential learning program that connects urban youth with musical artists to learn the realities of the music industry, and one for Wh!psmart, the only statewide trade association dedicated to supporting creative workers and creative businesses.

Station Space also includes a greeting area at the building’s north entry, centrally located gender-neutral bathrooms, and a 40-person shared classroom space that overlooks the historic train station’s passenger waiting area. Floor-to-ceiling glass allows classroom users to view the station activity from above, however the classroom is acoustically separate so the noise doesn’t disrupt the learning happening within.
Collectively, Station Space is model for cultivating creative community and youth empowerment through long-term, sustainable public-private collaboration. As Daniel Pak of Totem Star observed, “Young artists who have an important voice, the voice of this city, will never again have to ask permission to write, rehearse, record, collaborate, have a home to create.”