With a striking cor-ten exterior and direct connection to a new cafe, Steel Stacks is the result of a close relationship with the original property owner, developing a site focused on community and everyday neighborhood connection. Steel Stacks was designed with the principle that human connection is fundamental to human health, and neighborly friendship is one antidote (of many) to civic division. As a result, residents’ connection to one another and to the neighborhood was a driving force for the design and development process. Steel Stacks is connected to a shared community courtyard, extending the resident space into the public realm, intersecting with the street and cafe. It’s easy to imagine, not too long from now, neighbors meeting over a coffee on Saturday morning–even brief, casual everyday interaction adds to quality of life and helps residents feel seen, known, and rooted in their place. The front porch is unfenced, inviting the sidewalk passerby in, rather than creating distance. The ADUs create opportunities to invite visitors, introducing new people to the city, or to have family close by. By partnering with the original property owner, Hybrid grants property owners editorial control and economic interest in the redevelopment of their lot. Seattle is experiencing urban flight–prospective homeowners attracted to the elements of suburban living like front porches, back yards, and more room and light are leaving the city’s core. With Steel Stacks, the Hybrid team attempts to reframe this as an invitation: Provide these elements in the urban context. With Steel Stacks, the team provides homeowners the living experience they strive for and deserve, keeping residents local, rooted in the city they know, and which knows them. Overlapping are cost concerns–what can a middle-class income buy me anymore? Is it worth it? Steel Stacks serves as an example of how market-rate development, too, can be built well and cost-effective, offering an option within reach to young professionals and creatives, avoiding displacement and providing design to serve living here for a long time to come. Steel Stacks is just half a mile away from the Nucor steel plant that informs the neighborhoods’ history and development. Romanticising and rooting in the industrial, Steel Stacks honors the past. At Nucor, steel is recycled and turned into rebar–in Steel Stacks, the material is translated into a lofted home full of opportunities and quirks unique only to the commercially zoned context. The team celebrated roof water collection with enlarged scupper boxes and routed the downspouts to a continuous bioretention planter at the base of the building. This planter creates a vegetated mote that is crossed by a timber bridge to access the front door. Along the perimeter, the team installed 30’ tall black bamboo to provide privacy from the neighbors and dense vegetation for the entry. Corten is an enduring material that will not require maintenance, and that will become even more beautiful over time thanks to the Seattle rain.