The Seattle Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion (SAOP) took home the top Platinum Award presented by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Washington at the organization’s 2025 Engineering Excellence Awards Gala in Bellevue, recognizing MKA’s innovative structural and civil engineering. This award ceremony recognizes the year’s top engineering achievements by Washington member firms for their work across the country and around the world at the state level.
Images: Hero Creative and Lara Swimmer/Esto
SAOP celebrated its grand opening in August 2024, the keystone piece in Seattle’s complex waterfront redevelopment vision. MKA’s structural and civil design for the aquarium—a geometrically unique and immersive cantilevered habitat—serves as the building’s primary gravity- and lateral-force-resisting systems and showcases how complex concrete forms can be used as structural concrete shear walls in high-seismic zones. Using built-to-curve formwork from a fabricator who designs ship hulls, the design team was able to shape the concrete to meet the architectural needs and create a robust enough structure extending to the roof that the central tank alone could be the main structural system, eliminating columns and creating more dramatic architectural expression.
The mathematically generated geometry of the complex 500,000-gallon aquarium habitat and 50-foot cantilevered section hovering over the main entrance was one of the most challenging concrete structures ever designed and executed by MKA. Still, the structure’s most significant accomplishment may not be its gravity-defying design—the building’s seamless integration with an unobstructed, transformative connection between the Pike Place Market and the reimagined Seattle waterfront takes it from impressive to generationally significant.