page_title: More Hall Annex
section_title: Demolition
hierarchical_section_title: More Hall Annex / History / Demolition
caption_attribution_description: Demolition of More Hall Annex, formerly the Nuclear Reactor Building, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
context_page_description: The More Hall Annex, formerly the Nuclear Reactor Building, was a building on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States, that once housed a functional nuclear research reactor. It was inaugurated in 1961 and shut down in 1988, operating at a peak of 100 kilowatts thermal, and was officially decommissioned in 2007.
  The reactor was housed in a reinforced concrete building designed in the Brutalist architectural style by UW faculty members. They designed the reactor room with large windows that allowed observation from the outside, in an attempt to demonstrate the safety of nuclear energy.
  The Nuclear Reactor Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, after a campaign led by an architecture student in response to the proposed demolition of the building. A later demolition plan prompted a lawsuit from preservation groups, which ended with a court ruling exempting the building from the city's landmarks-preservation ordinance. While this decision was eventually overturned, the university demolished the building in July 2016 and replaced it with a new computer science building that opened in February 2019.
context_section_description: On February 11, 2016, the UW Board of Regents approved a site plan that would demolish the More Hall Annex to allow for the construction of the new computer science center, to open in 2019. An attempt to incorporate elements of the nuclear reactor into the new computer science building was rejected because of the impact of potential seismic retrofits that would be required to meet modern standards. The computer science department instead plans to make a virtual tour of the building available online in a digital archive.
  After the decision by the King County Superior Court to exempt the building from city preservation ordinances, the university applied for a demolition permit in May 2016. Demolition of the More Hall Annex began on July 19, and preservationists held a mock funeral for the building with Daniel Streissguth, one of the project's original architects.
caption: Demolition work on the site of More Hall Annex in late July 2016
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