Weyerhaeuser – SOM
Completed in 1971 and often described as a “skyscraper on its side,” the Weyerhaeuser Corporate Headquarters near Tacoma, Washington, is a landmark of landscape-integrated modernism. Designed by SOM, the five-story building steps gently into the hillside with terraced floors and recessed, continuous glazing, allowing vegetation to spill over the edges and visually dissolve the boundary between architecture and nature.
The interior reflects the same ethos of openness: no full-height partitions divide departments, and a diamond-grid column layout, rotated against the building’s rectangular form, reinforces a fluid, non-hierarchical workspace. The result is an architecture that blurs distinctions—between building and landscape, structure and vegetation, public and private—exemplifying a sensitive and visionary approach to corporate design.
