Tall towers of Seattle's future

Greenscape at 1208 Pine St. Sustainable-minded developer SolTerra is planning this unusual terraced residential building for the base of Capitol Hill, called the Esker. Though it's hardly a tower, it will be a standout apartment building with seven rotated terraced levels, interconnected by living walls and dressed in greenscapes with views toward the Olympic Mountains. The plan calls for 72 units, 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and a rooftop restaurant. This rendering shows how the unique building might look from the west. The view is looking east with Pine Street running up the hill beyond. less Greenscape at 1208 Pine St. Sustainable-minded developer SolTerra is planning this unusual terraced residential building for the base of Capitol Hill, called the Esker. Though it's hardly a tower, it will be a ... more Photo: Courtesy SolTerra Photo: Courtesy SolTerra Image 1 of / 59 Caption Close Tall towers of Seattle's future 1 / 59 Back to Gallery

Back in 2000, standing 20-some stories up in the then-under-construction expansion of the Washington State Convention Center, I looked out across a skyline that was booming.

The other drywall and framing guys I worked with joked that the tower crane should be the official bird of Seattle, because everywhere you looked, there seemed to be one.

We didn't know what the future held.

Today, you can look up from the ground and count half a dozen tower cranes across much of downtown Seattle.

And it just keeps on going.

From the tech titans to foreign investors, plans for big buildings are piled almost as high as some of the towers.

Four 40-story towers in Bellevue; 600,000 square feet of office space along Mercer for Google; Amazon's behemoth Denny Triangle development of over 4 million square feet of office space; towers planned on three sides of the present Seattle Times building (one already under construction) ... you get the idea.

I pulled together a refreshed and more comprehensive list of some of the biggest or most unusual projects planned for downtown Seattle or the greater region. From monstrously big to just plain weird, there's a little bit of everything. Click through to see them all.