SB Profiles
The Space Arranger
Kyle Gaffney and SkB take a holistic approach to building design
By Rob Smith April 22, 2025
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Seattle magazine.
To say that Kyle Gaffney backed into a career in architecture may be a bit exaggerated, but he did get a late start. Gaffney, a cofounder and principal at Seattle architecture firm SkB, suffered a devastating knee injury and lost a soccer scholarship to the University of Puget Sound. Instead of college he went to work for a builder, hauling materials to the dumpster.
Ten years later, Gaffney realized he didn’t want to lug plywood the rest of his life, so he enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design, where he eventually earned bachelor’s degrees in architecture and fine art. He cofounded SkB with his wife, Shannon Gaffney, and Brian Collins-Friedrichs (who has since retired) in 1999.
The firm has its fingerprints all over Seattle, including significant projects such as the recently renovated 44-story US Bank Center, biotech hub Dexter Yard, 400 Fairview, and the Washington State Employees Credit Union in the U District. SkB has also worked with the likes of Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and Amazon. It has also done several high-end residential projects.
The firm has 37 employees. About half are architects.
My mom was an artist. My dad was a professional athlete, and played baseball in the Pacific Coast League. My brother was a great athlete. I was a good athlete. I played soccer my entire life, still playing. But I got my mom and grandma’s trait. My grandmother was a painter. My mom was just creative. So, I got that gene.
I was devastated when I lost my scholarship. My parents couldn’t afford UPS, so my brother hooked me up with one of his friends who was a builder. I started out as a laborer, and I just progressed. I ended up with a company that did custom homes.
We poured our own concrete, framing, wiring, plumbing, built our own windows, our own doors. An amazing experience. One of our guys was interested in architecture school, and that just really resonated with me.
There are a lot of architects who draw a detail that can’t be built, and yet they stomp and put their foot down and tell the builder “we’ll make it.” We won’t do that. And then there are times when I know a builder’s trying to take a shortcut. That’s where it really benefits us in this part of my career.
Shannon and Brian and I all worked at Callison. And Callison was in the US Bank building. We spent 18 hours a day in there. We knew all its challenges, and we knew there was some opportunity.
Back in the day Callison picked a post-modernism theme, so that’s the design of that building. If you remember those big concrete rings in the rotundas, the polished granite, it was just heavy. Escalators were smack in the middle. The diagram seemed broken. Our approach was to strip all the decoration and then move the escalator. It was a big lift.
When we started to tear that space apart, there were columns that were shown on the drawing that weren’t in the build. And then there were columns in the build that weren’t on the drawings. It was a constant real-time shift, and it took a really good team between contractor, architect, and owner. It created a very unique build situation.
The building has a food court, but we did not want that food court vibe. In San Francisco, there’s an old ferry terminal building that they put all these different retail shops in, but the building is the building. That’s the approach we took. The retailer’s brand will be present, but we don’t want the space to look like a food court. It doesn’t need to have a big neon sign out front. It was one of the influences.
US Bank Center is right in the middle of downtown. If we were four blocks north or four blocks south, it’s a different user. But when you’re right there, the space and the building itself is a destination. Just take it out of that mall experience.
The interiors are just as important as the exterior, and I don’t think a lot of architects see it that way.
(At 400 Fairview they) wanted to approach the ground plane first to create vibrancy in that tower, to support the neighborhood and create amenities for tenants. Tommy Bahama took it before the first shovel was in the ground. It was 80% leased before completion because people were hungry for that experience. And younger companies like startups all of a sudden go into a building that has a point of view.
And that was another thing in the old model. It was like, don’t offend anybody. At 400 Fairview, the credit union, Dexter Yard, we took a chance and said there’s a point of view here and people will resonate with it.
Seattle needs density and more people living downtown. If we start creating buildings with these destinations, it supports more residential around it. It’s super simple stuff like, well, we’ve got to have a coffee shop and a bakery because we want those smells in the morning.
Some of these towers can be repositioned as residential. We need more in the CBD. Around US Bank Center, it’s all hotels and towers. A handful of those could become residential. That’s good for us.
Just imagine if all our towers downtown had some sort of amenity. You’d be bouncing from the Fairmont Hotel and then the US Bank Center, and then to this building or that building. You go to London and other cities and it’s that kind of experience.
Most companies are now seeing that space really does matter. The old model was to get 300 people on two floors in the cheapest cubicles you could. That doesn’t work anymore. Who wants to go to work in that? In the old model, there were no options.
If I’m a CEO and this building has this great energy down at its ground plane, my staff is going to love it. They’re going to come down at four o’clock and have a glass of wine or dinner in the building. I think it puts more emphasis on the humanistic side of our urban core. We are an evolving society, and you have to create an environment to get the best out of these talented people. They have to enjoy their work environment. I don’t want to sit in misery all day.
We probably have seven projects right now for building owners who are coming to us to say, “How do I get people back in my building?” Well, let’s start with your ground plane.
Some companies took a very frugal approach, and they’re proud of that. But their execution failed. The spaces themselves aren’t that inspiring. And so now that I’ve been at home for four years, why would I go back to that now? If those office spaces were something that had soul or were humanistic, then people might be more apt to come back.
It used to be a building closed down at five or six o’clock, and it was kind of empty with the occasional restaurants. You think about that old model, and what a waste of space. I’m not going to name names, but there’s a couple new towers in our city that have gone up under the old premise. And then they’ll see if Subway wants to take a corner, or we’ll go get a nail salon or whatever.
It’s all about inspiring people. We all want to go to our favorite restaurant because the food’s good, but it also feels fantastic. We were doing that for the workplace long before the pandemic, and then when the pandemic hit it just made all of that even more important.
The thing that charges us the most is not about a project type or a sector, it’s about a client. What’s always driven us is that human experience.
We do single family, multifamily, commercial buildings, workplace environments, hospitality, retail. We’ve done some health care and a little bit of life science. I came from building single-family residential, but we don’t want to do just single-family homes. That’s boring for your entire career. We play in all these different market sectors. That’s by design. When the economy has ups and downs certain sectors take a hit and others rise.
Here’s what keeps me up at night: Getting the projects that we have, hitting and surpassing expectations, and then dreaming about what the next one is. Where’s the firm going next? Shannon and I are really optimistic.
