Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Seattle spent 1.15 billion dollars digging a brand-new arena out of the ground beneath a roof it refused to move. Climate Pledge Arena at Seattle Center opened on 19 October 2021 with a Foo Fighters and Death Cab for Cutie benefit concert, three days before Coldplay played the official ribbon-cutting and four before the expansion Seattle Kraken skated their first NHL home game. The building it replaced had opened on 21 April 1962 as architect Paul Thiry's Washington State Pavilion for the Century 21 Exposition - the Seattle World's Fair - and its swooping hyperbolic-paraboloid roof became a city landmark in 2017 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. The old bowl lived several lives first: converted in 1964 into the Seattle Center Coliseum, it hosted the Beatles twice, housed the SuperSonics from 1967 through their 1979 NBA championship, and re-emerged from a 1995 renovation as KeyArena - still too small, in the end, to keep the Sonics from leaving for Oklahoma City in 2008. The 2018-21 redevelopment by Oak View Group and architects Populous solved the size problem by going down: the 44-million-pound roof was propped on temporary supports while crews excavated a 740,000-square-foot arena beneath it, doubling the volume within the same protected silhouette. Amazon bought the naming rights and named the building after a commitment instead of itself: the arena runs all-electric on renewable power, banned single-use plastics and aims to be the first carbon-zero arena in the world. Capacity runs 17,151 for Kraken hockey, 18,300 for basketball - the WNBA's Storm are co-tenants - and up to 17,340 for the concert calendar that cycles the biggest tours in the world through the room. Set on the 74-acre Seattle Center campus beneath the Space Needle, with the Monorail linking it downtown, the arena did what forty years of civic argument could not: it returned major-league winter sport to Seattle without erasing the most recognisable roofline the World's Fair left behind.