Amazon Spheres add to Seattle’s quirkiness,
Crystal jungle meeting space for employees adds to Seattle skyline
Americans tend to think of brown shipping boxes when it comes to Amazon. But in Seattle, the company increasingly is known as a real estate owner. That’s especially true downtown, where Amazon employs more than 24,000 — some of whom will now hold meetings and take lunch breaks inside three gigantic glass spheres that add a Geodesic flare to the urban grid.
The tallest of the glass and metal Spheres rises 90 feet and is more than 130 feet in diameter, with two smaller spheres to each side. In a city that gets 152 days of rain a year, they will provide a warm, dry, plant-filled space for meetings, meals and mingling for up to 800 Amazon employees at a time.
“It’s kind of fantastic,” said Thaisa Way, an urban landscape historian at the University of Washington.
While time will tell, she thinks it could end up being an iconic building in the region, with those standing outside feeling like they’re looking out, not in.
And that’s where non-Amazon employees mostly will be. The public can access a dog park and playing field. Like all Amazon buildings, only employees and those badged for access will be allowed in, though there will be shops by the entrance the public can visit, and the building will be part of Amazon’s public tours once it opens, the company said.
The structure is being planted with more than 400 botanical species and will feature treehouse meeting rooms, a river and waterfalls, a green “bird’s nest” conference room, set to a temperature of 72 degrees.
Way credits Amazon for including lots of parklets and courtyards and alleys and walkways that weave through its buildings and are open to their public: “They’re big enough they could have made a walled-off campus and closed off some streets. But instead they enlivened them.”
There’s precedence for far-out buildings in Seattle. Since it opened in 1962 for the World’s Fair, the city has been known for its iconic Space Needle. Other stand-out structures include Paul Allen’s Museum of Pop Culture — which the The New York Times famously described as looking “like something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over and died” — and the much-lauded Central Library, designed by acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
“It’s exciting when we take a leap of faith and build something differently. Sometimes it can get a little shy, but every so often, with a little push, Seattle does something out of the box,” Way said.
“It’s exciting when we build something differently.” Thaisa Way, an urban landscape historian at the University of Washington