In Haeundae, a beach district on the eastern edge of Busan, South Korea, there is a tower called LCT The Sharp. It is 411.6 meters tall. That is 1,350 feet, 101 floors, the second tallest building in the country, and it stands directly on the sand, flanked by two 85-story residential towers, with a hot spring spa and a water park in the base and an observation deck on the top three floors. It is on a beach, in what an American planner would call a suburb, not in Busan's historic downtown or its central business district.
That is the part Americans cannot process. Korea does not ration its best architecture to the city core. When Busan decided to build a world-class landmark, it put it where people swim. The result is one of the most recognizable skylines in Asia, and it belongs to a district, not a downtown.
Now look at Redmond.
Redmond is the home of Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world, and the place where a large share of the planet's cloud is run. In 2025 light rail arrived: the 2 Line now runs through Overlake and into downtown Redmond. The city holds the north end of Lake Sammamish, with Marymoor Park's 640 acres sitting between the rail line and the water, and the Sammamish River trail running through the middle of town. By every measure that matters, this is one of the richest, best-educated, best-connected suburbs in the United States.
Its downtown is capped at 144 feet, and that is the generous number, available only by maxing out the incentive program near the rail station. The base allowance is 60. The suburb that runs the cloud has a skyline shorter than its evergreens.
| Haeundae, Busan | Redmond | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Beachfront district, miles from downtown | Lakeside tech district, 15 miles from downtown Seattle |
| The amenity | Haeundae Beach | Marymoor Park, 640 acres, and the north end of Lake Sammamish |
| The anchor economy | Tourism, port city of 3.3 million | Microsoft headquarters, the most valuable company on earth |
| Transit | Metro line, urban expressway | 2 Line light rail, opened 2025, plus SR 520 |
| Tallest allowed | LCT The Sharp built: 1,350 ft, 101 floors | Downtown capped at 144 ft; Overlake allows 30 stories, unused |
Same hand of cards. One city played it. And here is the detail that makes Redmond the right place to start: the permission already exists. Redmond's own zoning allows up to 30 stories in Overlake, the tallest allowance in the city, written into code and sitting there unused. Nobody has built to it. The ceiling is not the law. The ceiling is nerve.
Burnham Civic proposes Redmond's tallest building: a landmark tower in the Overlake or Marymoor corridor, standing against the park and the lake the way LCT stands against the beach. A tower you see from the 520, from a 2 Line train, from a kayak on the Sammamish Slough, and from the far shore of Lake Sammamish. A real piece of architecture, with a crown, built to be photographed for a hundred years.
The height target is plain: use the 30 stories Redmond already wrote into its own code, and make the case for more. Haeundae went from beach town to 101 floors in one generation. Redmond does not need 101 floors to change what the word suburb means in Washington. It needs one tower good enough that people ride the train to Redmond just to look at it.
This is the first filing in a larger Burnham Civic doctrine: beautiful architecture in the suburbs. Sometime around 1950 the American settlement pattern decided that ambition lives downtown and everything else gets the leftovers: the five-over-one, the office park, the strip center. Busan never agreed to that, and neither did the streetcar suburbs America built before the war, which is why their main streets are the most expensive real estate in every metro today.
Redmond is the right opening move because Redmond has already done the hard parts. It built the employment base, it got the train, it preserved the park and the river. A city that hosts the company running the world's computing, and then caps itself at 144 feet, has quietly accepted leftovers. Nobody ever voted for that ceiling as a vision. It accumulated, the way ceilings do.
Modern Deco. The living continuation of the style America invented the last time it believed in tall buildings: setback massing that steps as it rises, vertical masonry piers that pull the eye up, bronze metalwork, and a crown that is lit, sculpted, and legible from across the lake. New York recently proved the language still works at extreme height. 111 West 57th Street, finished in terracotta and bronze at 1,428 feet, is the most elegant supertall built anywhere in decades. Seattle Tower proved it locally in 1929, with 33 shades of brick climbing to a lighter top.
The skin should be glazed terracotta, and there is a regional reason. The clay seams of the Renton-Auburn corridor fired the terracotta that built early Seattle, including the Arctic Building's walruses, before the kilns closed in the Depression. Our material standard work calls for bringing those kilns home, and a tower-scale order is exactly the guaranteed demand that justifies the first one. The Eastside's first landmark gets built from Puget Sound clay, and every building after it gets cheaper to clad.
This matters from the air as much as from the train. Every approach into SeaTac crosses the region's rooflines, and a city of glass and gravel ballast reads as nothing from a window seat. Masonry reads. A terracotta crown on the Eastside is marketing the region can never buy back once it builds another glass slab instead.
We are building the full Busan case study, the tenant-stack economics, and the site file for the Overlake and Marymoor corridors. The basics are above. The working file below is for members.
Busan put 1,350 feet on the sand. Redmond has the lake, the park, the train, and the company that runs the cloud. It is missing one decision.
Incorrect password.
Construction started October 28, 2013 and the complex was completed November 30, 2019, with POSCO Engineering and Construction delivering the structure: roughly six years from groundbreaking to Korea's first and largest beachfront residential development. The site was a former tourist hotel parcel on the sand, rezoned and entitled through Busan's district government for residential use at landmark height.
And that entitlement is where the cautionary tale lives. The LCT project became one of Korea's biggest municipal corruption cases. In November 2016 the developer behind the project, Lee Young-bok, was indicted on charges of amassing a slush fund of roughly 57 billion won and lobbying public officials, with the investigation reaching lawmakers, judges, and prosecutors, and the former head of Haeundae district was arrested as the scandal widened. The towers got built anyway, and they are magnificent, which is the uncomfortable lesson in full: demand for a beachfront landmark was strong enough to survive the dirtiest entitlement process in recent Korean memory. The market was never the problem. The process was. Redmond's version runs the same play with a clean sheet: public entitlement, open record, council votes in daylight. We get the tower without the indictments.
A 101-story tower on a beach only pencils because every layer monetizes the height differently. The LCT stack, bottom to top: a shopping mall, a hot spring spa, and a water park at the base, which make the tower a destination for people who will never go upstairs. The Signiel Busan hotel, run by Lotte with 260 rooms, opened June 2020 on the lower tower floors, branding the address. Above it, 561 serviced residences marketed heavily to outside investors, which carried the construction financing. Next door, the two 85-story towers of straight residential. And at the very top, floors 98 through 100, the BUSAN X the SKY observatory, a ticketed attraction that turns the building's height itself into a paying tenant.
Read the stack as a machine. The public pays at the bottom and the top, residents pay for the middle, and the hotel pays in brand. Nobody is renting generic office space. That is why it worked in a district away from the business core, and the same program fits Redmond: retail and spa base on the rail line, a flagged hotel that upgrades the entire Eastside market east of Bellevue, residences above it, and an observatory at the crown with Rainier in one direction, the Cascades in the other, both lakes below, and the Seattle skyline on the horizon. There is no public observation deck anywhere on the Eastside. The first one will print money, and Microsoft's visitor traffic alone could carry the hotel.
Transfers: the district-landmark principle, the put-it-on-the-amenity siting, the mixed stack that needs no office tenant, the observatory as civic dividend, and the use of a single landmark to reprice an entire district, which Haeundae's Marine City demonstrates conclusively. Does not transfer: Korean project-financing-vehicle leverage, 561 units of foreign-investor presales, or 101 stories on day one. The Redmond version is shorter, cleaner, and still changes everything, because it is competing with a 144-foot ceiling, not with Busan.
The unlock already exists in Overlake. The Overlake zoning, consolidated effective January 2025, carries the tallest height allowances in the city, up to 30 stories, and nothing built or proposed comes near it. The play is the blocks around the Overlake Village light rail station: on the 2 Line, walking distance to Microsoft's campus, freeway-visible from 520, and high ground with sightlines to Bellevue, the lakes, and Rainier. A 30-story Modern Deco tower there requires no rezone, no comprehensive plan fight, and no council heroics. It requires a developer who reads the code and a design worth defending. That is the near-term move, and it sets the precedent height for everything after.
The park-edge play is Marymoor Village. The 2 Line's southeastern station sits in a district Redmond has explicitly planned for growth, directly against Marymoor Park's 640 acres, with the north tip of Lake Sammamish a short walk away. This is the true Haeundae move: the tower against the green and the water, seen across the park the way LCT is seen down the beach. Heights there today are modest, so this is the second tower, the one that takes a rezone fight worth having, after Overlake proves the market. Doctrine in one line: first tower where the code already allows it, second tower where the amenity is, and the downtown cap becomes indefensible somewhere in between.
One more Eastside note for the file: downtown Redmond's 144-foot cap survived the June 2025 zoning consolidation untouched. Nobody defended it as a vision. It simply rolled forward. Caps that roll forward unexamined are exactly what this project exists to put on trial.
Everything above assumes the tower gets built, and the honest reason the Eastside is a sea of six-story boxes instead of towers is that the cost of a building does not rise smoothly with its height. It jumps at a cliff, and the first cliff sits right at six floors. Up to roughly six stories a building can be framed in wood over a concrete base, the podium type on every Redmond block. Cross that line and code forces the whole structure into steel or concrete, which runs two to three times the cost per square foot. That single step is why a developer stops at six and builds three short buildings instead of one tall one.
A second cliff waits at seventy-five feet, where a building legally becomes a high-rise. Above that line the fire code stops assuming a ladder truck can reach the top floor and starts requiring the building to save itself. That means pressurized stairwells with fans that hold smoke out, a diesel generator and fuel to run life safety when the power is cut, fire pumps staged up the tower because city water pressure gives out around the seventh floor, a fire-service elevator built to carry crews up under manual control, extra fire-rated egress stairs that eat rentable floor on every level, a zoned voice-evacuation system, and a fire command center off the lobby where the fire department runs the whole building from one console. None of it earns a dollar of rent, all of it needs backup power, and all of it takes floor area a podium never surrenders. The taller the tower, the more of each floor vanishes into elevator shafts and mechanical risers, so a slender tower that is eighty-five percent rentable at the base can fall to sixty or seventy percent near the top.
Stack those costs against the rent a Redmond floor can command and a plain residential or office tower does not clear its own cost of capital. None of that is a reason to give up, because it is the exact problem the LCT tenant stack was built to solve, which is why this project is a mixed-use landmark rather than a rental slab. The retail, spa, and water-park base earns from people who never go upstairs. The observatory turns the height itself into a paying attraction. A flagged hotel monetizes the address. The residences above carry the middle. Each layer pays for the height a different way, which is the only structure that makes a tower pencil in a market that is not Manhattan. Build the stack and the height earns its keep. Build a single-use slab and you have rebuilt the exact reason nobody has used the thirty-story allowance yet.
The most famous tall building in the world is also the best warning about how to finance one. The Empire State Building opened in 1931 about seventy-five percent empty, sat near twenty-five percent occupancy through most of the Depression, and got mocked as the Empty State Building. Management ran lights on the upper floors to fake occupancy from the street. It did not turn a profit for roughly twenty years, and what carried it was not office rent. In its first year the observation deck earned about as much as all the leased space combined, and over the building's life the observatory out-earned the offices. The icon survived on tourism rather than tenants.
That is the case against making this an office tower, and the 2026 market makes it sharper. Downtown Seattle office vacancy just set another record near twenty-eight percent. The Eastside is healthier and actually tightening, helped by Microsoft's new Redmond leases and an emerging wave of artificial-intelligence tenants in Bellevue, but for the first time in a decade no new office building is being delivered on the Eastside at all. Lenders will not finance a speculative office tower, and they now want an anchor tenant signed for forty to sixty percent of the space before a single dollar of construction debt funds. The Empire State approach of building the landmark and waiting for tenants is the one thing the capital markets will not allow today. This tower earns its office identity, if it carries office at all, from a pre-committed anchor, and it earns its magic from the observatory the way the Empire State always did.
The thirty-story Overlake allowance is real and unused, and it needs no rezone to build, which is the near-term move. But the doctrine is to push past the code's incentive ceiling of three hundred feet, and the way to do that in Washington is legislative rather than a variance, because a height cap is a legislative standard and no city grants a two-hundred-foot variance. The tool is a development agreement, authorized by state law under RCW 36.70B.170, in which a city and a developer negotiate the height and density directly in exchange for public benefits the code could not otherwise require. The city adopts it by ordinance after a public hearing, and it locks the terms in for ten years, which also shields the project from a future council changing the rules midstream. Redmond is already running this play, with live development agreements in Overlake right now, including the R22 Overlake Mixed-Use agreement and Overlake Commons, both negotiated in exactly this corridor.
The currency that buys the height is specific and already priced into Redmond politics: deep affordability. The council's stated priority is affordable housing at fifty percent of area median income, and Overlake developers are trading that affordability for their height and density bonuses today. So the ask is a package rather than a bare request for height, offering deeply affordable homes, a genuinely public park-edge open space, family-sized units the market underbuilds, and a workforce-housing answer to a city where Microsoft keeps adding thousands of jobs and almost no housing, all in exchange for the height that makes the math work. To go above three hundred feet the comprehensive plan has to authorize a taller tier first, which means getting onto Redmond's annual amendment docket and making the case that Overlake is a regionally designated growth center already committed to tens of thousands of new homes. The people who decide are Mayor Angela Birney, a council now led by President Melissa Stuart, the planning staff who write the recommendation, Sound Transit as a transit-oriented ally, and a pro-housing coalition that turns out when the affordability is real.
One legal barrier quietly kills tower housing in Washington, and breaking it is a Burnham Civic campaign in its own right. Washington's condominium law imposes an implied warranty of quality on the developer, and for decades that warranty has drawn construction-defect lawsuits, usually filed by a homeowner association at a plaintiff attorney's urging. The litigation risk pushed condo insurance costs so high that developers stopped building for-sale condos and built rental apartments instead. That is why almost nothing in Washington is sold as a condo, and it matters here for a precise reason: the presale model that financed Busan's towers, where buyers pay in installments during construction and fund the building before it exists, is a condo model. Washington's law switches that engine off.
The reform is already moving and the path is clear. In 2025 the legislature passed an express-warranty alternative that lets small condo projects opt into an insured two-and-ten warranty instead of open-ended litigation exposure, and in the 2026 session that alternative is being extended from two stories to four. The strategy is to keep marching that ceiling upward, session after session, until it reaches the height that makes condo towers buildable, and to pair it with a requirement that an association hold an owner vote before it can file a defect suit. The frame that wins is homeownership rather than builder relief, because a condo is the only for-sale home a first-time buyer can afford, Washington builds almost none, and a funded insured warranty protects buyers better than years of litigation that mostly pays lawyers. The champion in Olympia is Representative Jamila Taylor of Federal Way, the coalition runs from homebuilders and realtors to Habitat and the pro-housing caucus, and the opposition is the trial bar, which is beaten by keeping real consumer protection in the bill instead of stripping it. The heavy push belongs in the 2027 long session, and it is the single reform that would let a Redmond tower be financed the way Busan financed Haeundae.
The firms that build these towers are Korean, and the timing to bring one to King County has never been better. POSCO, Hyundai's engineering arm, Doosan, and Samsung's construction group build supertall mixed-use landmarks as their core business and take national pride in flagship projects. Two forces are pushing them toward America at once. Their domestic construction market is soft and the big firms are cutting staff, so they need overseas pipelines. And as part of the 2025 trade deal, Korea has pledged three hundred fifty billion dollars into United States industries, which puts Korean capital under a national mandate to find American projects. A tower-builder looking for exactly this kind of work is more reachable today than at any point in a generation.
The way in is a joint venture that trades what each side lacks. A Korean firm brings capital, engineering, construction capacity, and often a relationship with a Korean anchor tenant already expanding in the United States, while it lacks American land, entitlements, local political relationships, and the ability to navigate a King County permit. That is precisely the local half of the deal: assemble the site, win the entitlement using the Overlake playbook above, provide the political cover, and hand the partner a shovel-ready, litigation-capped, anchored project rather than a rendering. The litigation-capped part is why the condo reform above is not a separate fight, since foreign builders fear American construction-defect exposure specifically and the reformed warranty is what lets them say yes to Washington. The current politics help rather than hurt, because an administration built on inbound investment and reshoring celebrates Korean firms breaking ground on American soil, which brings goodwill and often faster federal permitting. The path to reach them runs through the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, the Korean consulate in Seattle, the American subsidiaries of the chaebol builders, the federal SelectUSA investment summit, and the Korean development banks that finance their overseas work. The product they would build, a mixed-use landmark with a hotel and an observatory, is the exact thing they are the best on earth at building.
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