As a child, my imagination was captured by a single building in Washington State: The Seattle Space Needle. It wasn’t just the elegant tower and the UFO-shaped structure, but also the very name itself — the Space Needle, as if we were trying to thread the sky. It was built for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, an era of changing times. John F. Kennedy was President and had already announced his intentions to land men on the Moon before the decade was out. The human drive for exploration, not only of this world, but the worlds beyond it, naturally collided with a piece of architecture aimed directly at those worlds. The Needle was first conceived as sketches on a placemat in a coffee house by Edward E. Carlson, the president of a hotel chain. His inspiration came, apparently, from the Stuttgart Tower in Germany, a television tower built in 1956. A dozen other architects worked from the initial sketches to the design we know today.
The Needle was built in the thirteen months before the World’s Fair opened, starting with a foundation thirty feet deep and a hundred and twenty feet across, which weighed as much as the Space Needle itself in order to keep the structure’s center of gravity just above the Earth’s surface. The flying saucer structure on top is comprised of five levels, including a revolving restaurant and Observation Deck. The top house is balanced so well that it only takes a one horsepower motor to rotate the restaurant. The building was finished within four months of its opening date, the first day of the World’s Fair on the 21st of April, 1962.
Occasionally, storms will force the Space Needle to close (Columbus Day, 1962, was one such storm; and a storm on Inauguration Day of 1993 was another; wind gusts were at ninety miles an hour); however, the Needle is built to hold against a wind of 200 miles per hour, and it’s survived earthquake tremors, too, even the one in 2001 which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, approximately the same size of quake that shook Los Angeles in 1994. While the Needle was built for 4.5 million dollars, just ten years ago it underwent a renovation for twenty million. If you’re checking into a hotel Seattle makes available for its tourists and travelers alike, to not stop at the Space Needle would be like traveling to Paris and not stopping in at the Eiffel Tower.
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