Name: Inside Amazon's Spheres, the Biodome Office in Seattle | WSJ Open Office
Uploaded: 2025-03-22T11:58:27.000Z
Duration: 5 min 13 s
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Basic passive voice

We see it even in the pupil of the human eye.

The idea was that every Amazon employee had the opportunity to get up from their desk to walk over to the spheres and to come into this kind of environment to think and act differently than they would inside an office building.

All of these spaces are intended to create different work environments.

When we were designing the campus, we wanted to do something that was super special, not just for our employees and their families, but also for Seattleites.

I started thinking about what's missing from the urban environment, and it's generally a link to nature.

And so we wanted to link nature to the workplace.

There's ample studies that show that walking in the park versus walking on a city street results in you being less stressed.

When we decided to do spheres, we found there were many really attractive historical examples.

We liked all those things, but we wanted something organic to reflect the purpose of the building.

We found it in something called a pentagonal hexacantahedron.

If you look at this example, this is one of our modules we call a catalan.

It's an elongated pentagon, of which there would be 60 in order to create an entire sphere.

As I hold this 3D print-up of a catalan, you'll see behind it the large-scale version of it that's inside the sphere structure.

As you look at the building itself, it's very hard to find this module, because it's intended to look more like a vine's groin or a spider web.

The biggest challenge, by far, was how to solve the environmental conditions here.

Traditional greenhouses, as you know, are hot and humid.

We're trying to create an environment for people during the day, and that it's for plants day and at night.

We're walking through the 7th Avenue sphere.

A company can hire the best people, and big companies do it all the time, but oftentimes they put these people in little boxes and cubicles.

They're really not working at their fullest potential.

One of the things we wanted to do in the sphere was to create a place where they could learn about something different, be curious about something different.

This is alocasia portii, slipper orchids from Southeast Asia.

This is one of my favorite spots here in the sphere.

Behind me is one of the largest indoor living walls in the country.

The wall stands about 62 feet tall, almost 50 feet wide.

It has something in the order of 25,000 individual plants on it.

That's a lot of green that we're looking at.

During the day, we have that environment that both of us like, and at night, the temperature lowers to 55 degrees, and the humidity goes up to 85% or more.

All the furniture, all the equipment, all the finishes are what we would normally design for outdoor use.

In addition to the paths through the forest, there's also this ring path.

From here, you can see that we look out to the city, so you get the best of both worlds.

The canopy walk was another idea of Amazon's.

We wanted to create the opportunity for walking meetings because we knew that if you were walking between 1.2 and 1.8 miles per hour, you were at the best speed at which to think.

It was a major task to get this tree in because the spheres had to be complete when the trees came in, because they had to have the environment they needed to thrive and live.

We had to create an opening at the top of the building after it was complete, big enough to pull in a tree like this.

The birdcage is a space for conferencing or to just work alone.

It is a space that is open like all the rest, but we wanted to give it some privacy.

You'll notice the vines that are growing up all the way from the floor below up onto the birdcage to provide that privacy screen.

You can look 360 degrees around the city.

The majority of people that are being born today will never see the Milky Way because of light pollution and living in cities.

We need to counteract that with as many different good ideas as we can.

The spheres was one of those good ideas to not only create alternative places to work, but to reintroduce nature into the middle of the city.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology