Everything You Need to Know About Amazon's New HQ
On a beautiful spring or summer day, have you ever looked longingly out the window, buffeted by the chill of industrial strength AC and squinting against the fluorescent lights and thought, “We should have class outside?” For Amazon employees, this is just a part of life on the company's new campus.
In addition to three giant office towers -- one of which is already completed -- there are also three Spheres with plants and waterfalls, for when Amazon workers want to take a break from their desks. Officially open as of January 2018, you can get a glimpse at them now thanks to an official Instagram account. Or, you can take a look in person if you happen to be in town on the two days each month that they are open to the public.
Take a look inside Amazon’s outdoorsy new space.
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The Spheres are home to to 400 species of more than 40,000 plants from more than 30 countries -- including a 6 foot tall corpse flower. In addition to employees being able to take advantage of working next to a river and man-made waterfalls, they can take meetings in treehouse-style conference rooms. The space is also open to the public, via guided tour and appointment.
Between the three spheres and three office towers, the company will hold a total of 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle when the new campus is finally completed. In total, the company paid more than $259 million for the land the new campus will sit on.
The campus will have a meeting center that can fit 2,000 people. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos famously prefers to keep teams small and nimble, only big enough that it would take two pizzas to feed them while they are developing big ideas for the company. How many pizzas will be needed to feed that crowd?
On the lower floors of Doppler, there is a self-serve grocery store called Market Place. Other options on various floors include grills for impromptu barbeques, sandwiches and Asian cuisine. But the unique dining options also extend beyond the HQ, with well-regarded eateries opening in the new neighborhood that provide options ranging from Korean-Hawaiin tacos, Middle Eastern street food and old-fashioned diner fare.
It’s fitting that Amazon, with ubiquitous recommendation algorithms, would have its new campus designed via algorithm. According to architecture firm NBBJ, “Design computation helped to generate the spheres, each a pentagonal hexecontahedron formed by tessellating a pentagon across its surface. Algorithms enabled the team to quickly generate a steel-and-glass structure that could be constructed efficiently and cost-effectively.”
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