Amazon’s new Seattle home sounds more like a rain forest biome than a tech campus

Matt Hickman

Inside Amazon’s tri-sphere biodome complex in downtown Seattle, employees will find ample opportunities to relax and unwind amongst 3,000 different species of plants, carnivorous ones included. (Rendering: NBBJ)

Just when you were beginning to think you had it good with your foosball table, cold brew dispenser, meditation nook and breakfast cereal buffet, Amazon goes and really ups the ante when it comes to employee-placating in-office perks by building its workers a crazy greenhouse-cum-chill-out zone that, at first glance, is more Pauly Shore than Jeff Bezos.

Consuming downtown Seattle’s Denny Regarde neighborhood like an encroaching fog coming in from Elliot Bay, it’s already been well established that Amazon’s new corporate headquarters/nonstop construction project is large (3.3 million square feet spread out across three city blocks), slightly ominous and impossible to avoid. Also based in Seattle, tech campus-specializing architecture firm NBBJ prefers to call its city-transforming work a “neighborhood rather than a campus” to more appropriately “reflect Amazon’s “community-based culture.” Read more.