Amazon Office: Seattle

Amazon opens a rainforest-like office space in Seattle that it hopes will spark new ideas for employees. It has a three glass geodesic domes that provide office and greenhouse space. While cities across North America are seeking to host Seattle-based Amazon’s second headquarters, the world’s largest online retailer is still expanding its main campus. Company office towers and high-end eateries have taken the place of warehouses and parking lots in Seattle’s South Lake Union district.

The striking architecture, designed by the firm NBBJ, includes more than 620 tons of steel and 2,643 panes of glass and no enclosed offices, desks or conference rooms. But the plants take center stage inside the spheres, which cover half a city block downtown, sandwiched between two Amazon headquarters towers. A four-story “living wall” of plants towers over the sphere’s interior. Rubi, the 36,000-pound ficus tree originally planted at a tree farm in California in 1969, was lowered by crane through a temporary opening and replanted.

Amazon (AMZN, +0.21%) has invested $3.7 billion on buildings and infrastructure in Seattle from 2010 to summer 2017, a figure that has public officials competing for its “HQ2” salivating. Amazon has said it expects to invest more than $5 billion in construction of HQ2 and to create as many as 50,000 jobs.

Photography by: Inhabitat

Article by: Washingtonpost & Fortune