Front Street False Front

Located on the corner of a busy main street thoroughfare and a quiet, residential side street, this project proposed a series of layered built form as a response to the complex, diverse, historic context of Issaquah.

False fronts were part of the vernacular built form in western American towns in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They recall nostalgic movies, which themselves evoked a fictionalized memory of western expansion. Lacking the resources to build grandly, the owner of a bank or shop in a frontier town would build a tall flat facade that evoked a bigger building in a bigger city which hid the humble building behind it.

Our design takes he basic function of the false front and inverts it into a transparent screen which revealing the form of the building beyond.

Scope:

New mixed use building with six residential units over two commerical units with below grade parking