Desperate to keep up with the wonderfully weird and wacky office spaces that seem to be the norm these days, Amazon has once again revised plans for its downtown Seattle office, forgoing the duel bio-dome centerpiece that Curbed Seattle shared in May in favor of, well, even more bio-domes. The Seattle-based architecture firm NBBJ re-imagined the 3M-square-foot project to feature what looks almost exactly like three huge soap bubbles, sitting slightly lower to the ground to provide more daylight. No exact measurements are given yet, but the greenhouse domes will be large enough to house both offices and fully grown trees.
In an ambitious move, the pattern on the white-painted steel domes are meant to reference the pentagons of a soccer ball, a starfish, and the petals of a flower. All at once, naturally. Besides the bubbly center, this proposal for Amazon's new campus also includes a network of covered walkways connecting the three surrounding 37-story towers and the network of smaller buildings at the edge of campus. When this massive undertaking is finally completed, it will mark the largest development in Seattle's history. Up until then, though, the critics are not impressed.
· Amazon updates designs for Seattle headquarters [The Architect's Newspaper]
· All Amazon coverage [Curbed Seattle]