July 2025 Project of The Month: Washington 1000
Washington 1000 is a full-block, 17-story building in the center of Seattle’s Denny Triangle and incorporates a range of sustainable amenities. This LEED Gold certified building has street-level retail space and was specifically designed with business headquarters in mind, including a 2-story lobby, a conference center, and luxurious building and rooftop amenities for employees, including art installations.
Since 2009, Nine Dot Arts has propelled their vision and mission to create vibrant experiences among spaces with partnering developers. Co-founders Martha McGee and Molly Casey, along with their team of over 30, have so far completed over 1,000 projects working with local artists. Their team specializes in working to understand each community and space in order to provide the best artistic representation of each project. They are experts in strategizing and managing projects like this one.
The local artist collective selected for the Washington 1000 installation was SuttonBeresCuller - John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler - who have been working together since 2000. This trio is known to engage with the Seattle community and create projects that start conversations and push artistic boundaries. They are playful in their style and concepts, working to transform locations in surprising ways that instantly become another city symbol.
We worked directly with SuttonBeresCuller to bring their vision for Nine Dot Arts and Washington 1000 to life, hand fabricating 1 neon installation for their lobby and 3 neon tower sculptures for an exterior rooftop space. The lobby installation consists of 8 double-sided 16”x12” trees made from aluminum with clear acrylic faces and an aluminum retainer painted green and illuminated on both sides by 10mm green hand bent neon. To emphasize the feel of the forest, these trees were arranged at random and surrounded by greenery after installation.
The three neon tower sculptures defy logic and explore imaginative combinations of weather and natural elements, full of Pacific Northwest-specific whimsy. One sculpture featuring symbols for wind, a mountain and a wave crashing over it is 9 feet tall. The other two are 14.5 feet tall, one featuring a tree, the sun, and a raincloud over a fire pit. The final sculpture, which might spark the most curiosity, displays a fish under an umbrella with a pinecone over the top. The challenging aspect to these sculptures is the way they are arranged to fit, stacked over each other, and all facing different directions to add energy and dimension to the collection.
As SuttonBeresCuller described it, “Simple icons—trees, clouds, raindrops, and suns—are stacked in unexpected, whimsical combinations that defy traditional logic: a tree balances on a cloud, a wave breaks on top of a mountain...By reordering these symbols, we celebrate our region’s unique relationship with nature—an adventurous connection that thrives on reinterpretation.”
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