Architect John Graham, Jr. was born On This Day, April 8, 1908. In the late 1940s, he designed the what has become the modern shopping center. He also designed the Space Needle for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and the first revolving restaurant in Honolulu, Hawaii.
John Graham, an architect whose designs included the Space Needle for the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle,
Born and raised in Seattle, John Graham Jr., attended the Moran Military Academy and then Queen Anne High School, graduating in 1925. He began his formal architectural education at the University of Washington in 1926, and then transferred to Yale, where he received his Bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1931. Due to the Depression, Graham worked in the retail business before joining his father’s architectural practice as a partner in 1937. Business was booming for the firm, and at the age of 30, Graham Jr. opened a branch office in New York City with engineer William Painter as a partner.
During the late 1930s, Graham focused his work on designing retail spaces. With the outbreak of WWII, the New York office closed and Graham turned to the design of war housing, developing several large FHA housing projects in the suburbs of Washington DC and Seattle.
During this time, Graham Sr. had begun transferring the practice to his son, and officially retired from active practice in 1946. After his father’s retirement, John Graham Jr. changed the name of the firm to John Graham & Company and began to design large shopping malls, which were a new concept at the time.
Graham expanded the firm from a relatively modest regional practice to an office with national presence. It was ultimately responsible for over a thousand commissions.
By 1949, the company employed thirty-two draftsmen, designers, structural, mechanical and electrical engineers.
Their primary focus was commercial projects. Many were straightforward mid-century modernist office towers, such as San Francisco's 44 Montgomery tower in 1967. But Graham was also responsible for early development of the enclosed shopping mall, notably Seattle's Northgate Shopping Center, which opened April 21, 1950. Northgate was the very first place to boast the name “mall” built in the United States.
The firm would go on to design seventy malls nationwide.
Graham’s firm also designed a variety of schools, churches and factory buildings.
Graham had a reputation for correctly assessing a project's schedule, budget and feasibility, and this earned him the title "a businessman's architect." He was licensed to practice in ten states and was favored by many developers, corporations, and institutional clients.
Among the over 1,000 projects by the firm is Washington Natural Gas Headquarters (1964), Olympic Hotel parking Garage (1965), the 42-story Bank of California Building, the Westin Towers (1969, 1982), 1600 Bell Plaza (1976) and the 44-story Wells Fargo Building in San Francisco (1966).
Graham’s most well-known project was the 600 ft tall Space Needle for the Seattle World’s Fair. The initial design was claimed by Graham and fellow architect Victor Steinbrueck (a consultant on the project), but the design was also influenced by the Century 21 Exposition design standards and aerospace theme established by supervising architect Paul Thiry. In addition, in 1959 Edward E. Carlson, the chief organizer of the World’s Fair, had sketched the Space Needle’s original flying saucer concept on a napkin, and set plans for the tower in motion.
However, Carlson’s early designs for the structure resembled a colossal balloon tethered to the ground.
It was Victor Steinbrueck who contributed the idea of the tower’s hourglass shape.
Graham had the concept of a flying saucer on the tower, reflected in the halo which houses the Space Needle’s restaurant and observation deck.
The revolving restaurant, the "Eye of the Needle", was Graham's conception. He'd already devised "La Ronde" for the Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu in 1961, and was awarded a patent for the idea in 1964.
Clearly a collaboration of ideas, it was nonetheless Graham’s firm that executed the final design of the Space Needle.
Even after the project found a financer in the Pentagram Corporation—an organization composed of Graham, contractor Howard S. Wright, timber magnate Norton Clapp, and moneymen Ned Skinner and Bagley Wright—a number of early hurdles prevented construction. Chief among them was the acquisition of land on which to build the tower, as Seattle’s fairgrounds didn’t seem to have a suitable lot that could be purchased for private use. During the last legs of the quest for space, the team happened upon the 120-foot by 120-foot plot they would ultimately build on, forking over $75,000 for the find.
Its unique design quickly made the tower one of the most recognizable structures in the world, and the proud symbol of Seattle.
Under Graham’s leadership, the firm became one of the premiere commercial architectural firms in the United States. He headed the firm until 1985 and continued working until a few weeks before his death. John Graham Jr. died of heart disease on Tuesday, January 29, 1991 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. He was 82 years old and lived in Seattle and on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound.
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Some Quick Space Needle Facts:
- The Space Needle officially opened to the public on April 21, 1962 for the Century 21 Exposition, a space age-themed world’s fair.
- Construction crews worked around the clock to get the job done. While creating the foundations, 467 cement trucks achieved the largest continuous concrete pour in Western history, taking 12 hours to fill the 30 ft deep foundation hole beneath the streets of Seattle. After the foundation was complete, the main structure was bolted to it with 72 bolts, which were each also 30 ft long.
- The Space Needle stands at an impressive height of 605 feet. More surprising is that the structure’s foundation stretches down 30 feet. The tower’s center of gravity is a mere five feet above ground.
- It took approximately 400 days to build the Space Needle.
- The Space Needle’s graceful, wasp-waisted tower shape was inspired by an abstract sculpture by artist Don Lemon titled, “the Feminine One.”
- To help make the Space Needle’s public reveal all the more dazzling, a massive flame burned bright at the head of the tower throughout the run of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Called the needle of flame, the natural gas torch producing the flame was between 40 and 50 feet tall, and it’s said to have burned enough fuel to heat 125 homes. The purpose of this was to show how we’d all be using natural gas, as well as to act as a giant "clock" for the Fair, turning on every quarter hour. The apparatus was removed following the conclusion of the World’s Fair, allowing this energy to be diverted toward better use.
- Approximately 1.3 million guests visit the Space Needle per year, and nearly 60 million visitors have visited the tower since it opened in 1962.
- It cost $4.5 million to build the Space Needle in 1962. In 2018, the Century Project renovation cost closer to $100 million.
- The Space Needle is privately owned by the Wright family and sits on a 120-foot by 120-foot private parcel of land on the Seattle Center campus. The Space Needle is the only private property on the Seattle Center’s 74-acre campus.
- The Space Needle’s first professional cleaning took place in May of 2008, under the supervision of Alfred Kärcher GmbH & Co. KG. The heavy-duty scrubbing required water pressure of 2900 pounds per square inch and a water temperature of 194 degrees Fahrenheit.
- The Space Needle offers 360-degree views from its three main viewing areas – an indoor observation deck and open-air viewing area located at 520 feet, and an observation level featuring a revolving glass floor located 500 feet above ground. From the top, a visitor gets great views of the Seattle skyline, along with the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, Elliot Bay and the surrounding islands.
- There are a total of 848 steps in the tower, stretching all the way from the basem*nt to the observation deck.
- The Space Needle installed The Loupe, the world’s first revolving glass floor, in 2018. The Loupe offers never-seen-before views of the Space Needle’s unique architecture, elevators, and the city below.
- The Space Needle was designated as an official landmark in 1999.
- It takes 43 seconds to travel in a Space Needle elevator from the ground to the tower’s top level, 520 feet above Seattle.
- Hanna-Barbera Productions’ Jetson family made its debut in the same year as the Space Needle, and the two cultural icons share more than a birth year. George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy owe their cozy living arrangements to the Space Needle—animator Iwao Takamoto told The New York Times in 2005 that the Needle inspired the aesthetic for the Jetsons’ condominium.
- The Space Needle is also designed to withstand earthquakes up to a magnitude of 9.1. This was the strength of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, which is believed to have caused a great deal of damage in the Pacific Northwest region. In 2001, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in the area, and jolted the Space Needle, causing water to slosh from the bathroom toilets, but no more serious damage was incurred. The tower’s unusually deep foundations help to protect the building. Finally, the tower is adorned with 24 lightning rods plus the Needle itself, which in total form 25 lightning rods to protect the Space Needle from lightning strike.
- Construction workers in Seattle unearthed a long-forgotten time capsule at the Space Needle. Howard Wright, whose company built the Space Needle, sealed the time capsule in 1982. Millions of people who visited the 605-foot tower in the past 35 years likely walked right by it.
Not that they would have noticed. At some point long ago, there was an adjacent plaque advertising the capsule’s existence and noting that it should be opened in 2002. But somewhere along the way, that plaque disappeared. The year 2002 came and went. Space Needle employees who helped install the capsule scattered, and memories faded. And so on a Friday morning — more than 15 years late — the capsule was opened, and inside were letters, photographs and postcards all the way to 1962, the year the Space Needle opened and Seattle hosted the World’s Fair.
The time capsule has likely again been hidden away — this time, with instructions not to open it up again until 2062, the Seattle World’s Fair centennial.
