The PI's architecture critic, Lawrence Cheek, recently wrote this:

The best decoration for a high-rise is built in, not tacked on. It grows out of a bold, intriguing and thoughtfully detailed sculptural form. The Columbia Center still may be Seattle's best skyscraper simply because it's so strong: No other building expresses attitude, ambition and power so nakedly.

Let's remove The Columbia Tower out of the mud of Cheek's doubt by saying this with no hesitation: It is the best skyscraper in Seattle. And this is so not only because of what it expresses ("attitude, ambition and power") but also because it facilitates cognitive mapping over the widest area. The tower can be seen from my mother's grave in the hills above Renton, and from the east side of Vashon Island, and from the Ave in the University District, and from a considerable length of Aurora Avenue. Its orienting power helps make the city readable and your place in it understandable. It connects you to the center of things—a center that radiates from this one and sure point. When you see it from Magnolia Park or Rainier Avenue or on I-5 not long after passing the exit to the airport, you feel as if you are one of many beings and buildings orbiting this core. And that feeling of being a person in an urban system is the same great feeling of being a planet in a solar system.