Inside the Amazon Spheres: The plants, the architecture, and a transforming city
“Alexa, open the Spheres,” commanded Jeff Bezos, and with that, Amazon’s hybrid greenhouse and office space the Spheres officially launched.
“We wanted a space for employees to collaborate and innovate,” said Amazon Vice President for Global Real Estate and Facilities John Schoetter, introducing the building during the grand opening. “We asked ourselves: What is missing from the modern office? We discovered that missing element was a link to nature.”
Yesterday, Curbed Seattle got to take a look around the triple-domed structure, speaking with the architects and horticulturalists who built the concept and, eventually, the entire facility.
It’s been hailed as Seattle’s next major landmark. “Its artful design also contributes to the many iconic sculptures that our city and its rich heritage offer,” said Schoetter, name-checking Smith Tower, the Space Needle, and Pike Place Market.
Like those Seattle icons, the Spheres are distinctive and eye-catching, and are part of a big Seattle story; in this case, the Spheres mark the height of a tech boom in the city while still acknowledging the cherished relationship many Seattleites hold with the natural world.
The big difference between those landmarks and the Spheres: Not just anybody can go inside the Spheres. It’s Amazon workspace with secured entry, but even Amazon employees have to reserve an entry time in advance. The public can’t actually go inside unless they’re on an Amazon HQ tour.
The Spheres seem more towering from the inside than the outside. A green wall stretches up 65 feet, lining a staircase that climbs nearly to the top of the 90-foot-tall middle dome. Each of the levels provide different kinds of seating—some wrapping around a private center cylinder containing each floor’s restrooms with limited access to greenery. Others are tucked away within little courtyards.
The facility took more than six years of planning, construction, and planting to come to fruition, and the Spheres weren’t always going to be spheres. Initial concept sketches by local architecture firm NBBJ show shapes ranging from rectangular to Gothic arches. Among those shapes was a more traditional, bulbous conservatory shape.
That concept struck a chord with Amazon. Eventually, as the company and firm settled on the Spheres’s site, the more traditional shape evolved into more straightforward orbs.
“It got us excited because it took a traditional form and it took a whole new direction,” recalled NBBJ’s John Savo.
But creating a sphere is more difficult than it may appear. While the Spheres bear similarities to, say, a traditional geodesic dome, this structure is far more complicated.
Like geodesic domes, the Spheres are constructed using a repeating geometric module. NBBJ is calling the pentagonal frames used to construct the Spheres Catalans, since they drew on the work of Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan—who in turn drew from the work of Archimedes—to create them.
NBBJ worked with structural engineering firm Magnusson Klemencic Associates to run simulations and settle on the geometry.
“There are very few of those shapes you can use again and again,” explained Dale Alberda, NBBJ’s lead designer on the project. “What we love about this is that you can then develop one singular component, fit together like a puzzle.”