Photos: Kevin Scott
AT LEFT Washington Fruit & Produce’s exterior is meant to evoke a dilapidated barn. BELOW Inside, wood framework and glass walls feel peaceful.
YAKIMA
A FRUIT COMPANY THRIVES IN AN INDUSTRIAL SETTING Washington Fruit & Produce has grown apples, pears and cherries in Central Washington since 1916, when Yakima County had more fruit trees than any county in the nation. The grower first shipped them via the Northern Pacific Railroad’s Yakima depot before switching to trucking. Proximity to the highway is what propelled the company to convert 90 acres of flat and featureless floodplain on the edge of town into its base of operations. When it came time to design the company headquarters, architect Brett Baba, a Yakima native and principal of the Seattle firm Graham Baba, didn’t have much to work with. “Looking at it as a place to inhabit, it was bleak,” Baba said of the industrial site, noting its single redeeming quality. “If you look up over the industrial area and over the highway, you see the basalt cliffs,
and they’re extremely beautiful. Other than that, there was no context, or outlook or anything.” To start, the design team devised an L-shape building plan surrounded by earth berms and bordered by a perimeter wall that directs the eye up to the distant cliffs. The building’s exterior references a dilapidated barn—the only aesthetic suggestion offered by the client when he drove Baba to see one at the beginning of the process. “The thing I noticed about it was the skin was peeling off this building, so you could see the old structural elements inside—the knee braces and diagonal wood members and beams and columns,” Baba said. So inspired, the resulting building combines an elegantly exposed wood framework with pronounced crisscrossed columns, reclaimed barnwood siding, and a corrugated
metal roof. Top-to-bottom glass walls enable sightlines from employee desks to a peaceful, secluded courtyard garden, landscaped by Berger Partnership. Inside, soft lighting and acoustics take precedence, with natural light pouring in through the windows or offered via gentle uplighting designed by the firm. Carpeting, warm wood finishes and acoustic panels at the ceiling all buffer highway sounds. After all, Baba’s brief was to shield the office from its industrial surroundings. “They’re concrete boxes, those warehouses. There’s a lot of asphalt. [The client’s] mandate to us was that he wanted something that was completely the opposite of that,” Baba said. “They wanted something much more warm, so it was about creating this quiet, serene environment in this industrial area.”
APRIL | MAY 2020
1889 WASHINGTON’S MAGAZINE 53