The Seattle Tower, originally known as the Northern Life Tower, is a 27-story skyscraper

Skyscraper

A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building of many stories, often designed for office and commercial use. There is no official definition or height above which a building may be classified as a skyscraper...

 in downtown Seattle, Washington. The building is located on 1218 Third Avenue and is known as Seattle's first art-deco tower. Its distinctive, ziggurat

Ziggurat

Ziggurats were massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels.Notable ziggurats include the Great Ziggurat of Ur near Nasiriyah, Iraq; the Ziggurat of Aqar Quf near...

 exterior is clad in 33 shades of brick designed to effect a gradient

Gradient

In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar field is a vector field that points in the direction of the greatest rate of increase of the scalar field, and whose magnitude is the greatest rate of change....

 which lightens from the bottom to the top of the building. This is said to have been inspired by local rock formations.

According to the US National Parks Service website:
The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

 in 1975 and is also a designated city landmark.

External links

• Northern Life/Seattle Tower (Seattle) on HistoryLink
  HistoryLink
  HistoryLink is a website that is an encyclopedia of Washington State history. The site has more than 4,500 stories. There are 500 biographies and more than 14,000 images....
  
  
• Seattle Tower, middle 20 minutes of a one-hour broadcast from KUOW, Seattle. An audio tour of the building and its history.