Tower Building

The Tower Building is a specific architectural subject: most likely the Seattle Tower Building of 1929 at Third Avenue and University Street, an Art Deco skyscraper with a strongly tiered, stepped-back silhouette, or a comparable historic high-rise of the Pacific Northwest. Dennis's woodcut treatment would have suited such a building well; the planar massing of a tiered tower reduces cleanly to stacked rectangles in the relief block, and the vertical decorative banding typical of late-1920s Deco facades translates directly into incised line. The print probably presents the building from street level with sky above and adjacent rooflines below, a framing he used elsewhere when treating named civic structures. Coming in 1987 alongside Through the Night and Water Truck, Tower Building belongs to his sustained engagement with the built environment of Northwest cities — a body of architectural portraiture set within his broader project of recording the working towns and industrial fabric of his region.