by Hannelore Sudermann
photography by Matt Hagen
 The $360-million Lincoln Square is the most ambitious project ever undertaken in Bellevue.
From the wide windows in his office, Dan Meyers is watching the
city of Bellevue grow up. Over the past eight years he has seen a
sophisticated city emerge from the footings of a sleepy suburb.
As vice president of design and construction for Kemper
Development, Meyers has been in the thick of Bellevue’s changes.
The 41-year-old Washington State University alumnus has already had
a hand in more major projects than most architects ever hope for.
It’s a good fit for someone who knew he wanted to be an architect
since the ninth grade.
Meyers’s biggest project to date stands just across the street
from his office: a multi-use, gleaming glass tower containing a
hotel and condominiums, and beneath it, a shopping center. The
$360-million Lincoln Square is the most ambitious project ever
undertaken in the suburb-city of 100,000.
 A worker is engulfed in the view from Lincoln Square Tower's penthouse condominium.
But in 2003, when Meyers and a team of architects at Sclater
Partners inherited the project, it was nothing more than a gaping
hole on the upper end of Bellevue Way, a rebar- and concrete-lined
eyesore in the core of downtown.
The development, conceived in 1997, was to cover two downtown
blocks and hold a theater, restaurants, and million-dollar
residences with spectacular views of the Cascades, Lake Washington,
downtown Seattle, and the Olympic mountain range. It promised to
lead Bellevue out of suburbia and into a new life as a major
Northwest city.
But it seemed the project couldn’t get past the parking
garage.
In 2000 it had been sold to a Canadian developer, who broke
ground for the mixed-use highrise, but had to stop when the dot-com
bubble burst and emptied out Bellevue’s office market, costing the
project more than just tenants.
When the first developer couldn’t make it work, a second bought
in. But that effort failed, as well.
So the Lincoln Square project went looking for developers again.
This time more than 60 proposals made the rounds. The offers boiled
down to Meyers’s employer, Kemper, Bellevue’s biggest developer,
owned by third-generation Bellevue native Kemper Freeman Jr., and
really the only company with the money and the guts to do it.
The developer and a team of architects from Sclater Partners had
combed over the project details for months prior to the purchase.
“We were there when the padlocks were cut off the construction
trailers,” says Sclater’s Scott Kunnanz ’91. Kunnanz and three
co-workers, all graduates of WSU, discovered reams of documents and
drawings left behind when the project was abandoned.
They donned helmets and mining lanterns and trudged down the
five levels of the 12-acre parking garage to the bottom floor to
find standing water and no electricity. “It was like an abandoned
mineshaft, or an Egyptian tomb,” says Kunnanz, who had done similar
spelunking in WSU’s steam tunnels 15 years earlier.
A lanky guy who seems anything but in a hurry, Kunnanz had the
urgent task of taking stock of the garage, figuring out where it
went wrong, and righting it so the rest of the project could
continue.
The garage was so poorly configured, it would have taken 15 to
20 minutes just to drive through on a normal business day. Every
one of the stairs was out of compliance. It needed new ramps,
relocated ventilation, and larger parking spots.
“And it had to be fast,” says Kunnanz. “We were operating under
existing permits that were about to expire.”
Page
1
2
3
4
Continued
|
