Redmond's Tallest Building Plan

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, miles from Busan's historic downtown and its central business district.

Americans cannot process that part. 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.

Now look at Redmond.

The Same Hand of Cards

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.

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. No building has reached it. The ceiling is not the law. The ceiling is nerve.

The Project

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 the 30 stories Redmond already wrote into its own code, with the case for more to follow. 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.

Why the Suburbs

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. That ceiling was never voted on as a vision. It accumulated, the way ceilings do.

The Style

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. Each 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.

What TBC Is Doing

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.