Amazon is Putting 40,000 Plants Into Huge "Biospheres" in Seattle
With nest-like meeting spaces.
On Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tweeted that the first of 40,000 plants has been installed into the three “biospheres” his company is building in downtown Seattle.
As the city’s largest private employer, Amazon has outgrown its existing workspace, so the company is building a new campus in a neighborhood on the edge of town called Denny Triangle. It will ultimately span three blocks and include three towers, a sprawling meeting center, and these enormous biospheres.
The spheres will be 100-foot-tall glass domes with steel frames housing over 300 different species of plants from 30 countries around the world, many of which are endangered. The whole environment will be kept between 68 and 72 degrees.
Employees will use the spheres both to socialize and to work. They will contain meeting spaces that, according to Bloomberg, will look like “bird nests perched in mature trees.” Amazon’s plans describe the spheres as an opportunity for workers to “socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”
Jeff Bezos tweeted these pictures of the planting.
Plant 1 of 40,000.
Because everything's a marketing opportunity.
But it won’t just be a space for Amazon staff. “Public tours start 2018,” Bezos wrote in the tweet. The spheres will also open in early 2018.
An artist imagines the finished biospheres.
Amazon will hire a full-time horticulturist to take care of the spheres’ diverse plant life. CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business Jeff Wilke said he hopes they create a “place where new possibilities are explored and ideas are formed.”
One plant down, 39,999 to go. And after that, maybe floating blimp warehouses?
Correction: The spheres will open in early 2018. An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed the projected opening date.
