Yahoo Finance Amazon is building treehouses as part of wild new offices in downtown Seattle
There are millennial office spaces with their slides, bean-bag chairs, ping-pong tables and beer fridges, and then there’s what Amazon is building in Seattle.
The online retail giant is taking a wild new approach that it hopes will bring its employees closer to nature.
It is constructing 3,300,000 square-feet of new corporate office space on three downtown city blocks, including a massive natural playscape, inside three transparent spheres, complete with towering treehouses.
The project also features three 37-storey office towers, two mid-rise buildings and a large meeting centre.
Amazon is growing more than 3,000 species of plants in Redmond, Wash., about a 30-minute drive away, in a one-acre greenhouse in anticipation of the Biosphere-esque complex’s completion, according to the New York Times.
“We wanted it to be iconic, a structure that would be similar to another icon in the city, like the Space Needle for newcomers to Seattle,” John Schoettler, director of Amazon’s global real estate and facilities, told the newspaper.
“It would be a found treasure in the downtown neighborhood.”
When the building opens, (anticipated to be early 2018), the spheres will be home to wildlife on par with many top conservatories, and will allow Amazon employees to explore tree canopies three stories high.
Other highlights will include a five-storey living wall, suspension bridges and 40 to 50 trees, with meeting areas called treehouses.
The space is designed to help both nature and people thrive, with plenty of plant life but with humidity kept low enough that employees won’t drip sweat onto their laptops.
Temperatures in the spheres will hover around 22C and 60 per cent humidity during the day, and about 13C and 85 per cent humidity at night.
Amazon told the New York Times that it has poured more than US$4 billion into the construction of offices in Seattle over the last decade or so.
The new spheres will be open to employees, however the online retailer may eventually allow public tours.
Amazon is hoping the natural space will help inspire employees to think outside the box.
“The whole idea was to get people to think more creatively, maybe come up with a new idea they wouldn’t have if they were just in their office,” Dale Alberda, the lead architect on the project at NBBJ, told the New York Times. NBBJ is an architecture firm that has also worked with Google, Samsung and Microsoft.
There have been a number of studies citing the potential benefits of time spent in nature.
A 2015 paper by scientists from Stanford University found that city dwellers who took a 90 minute nature walk showed decreased rumination — in other words, they spent less time dwelling on negative thoughts.
A study four years earlier, performed on office staff at Southeastern University in Florida had similar findings, with employees who had more contact with nature reporting less stress and other related health complaints.
About a decade ago, research by Ihab Elzeyadi, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, also found that employees who were provided a view of nature at work were 20 per cent less likely to take sick leave.
But Amazon isn’t the only tech company that is hoping a more natural work environment can help employees’ creativity flourish.
Apple has hired an arborist to plant about 8,000 trees to surround office space on its Cupertino, Calif., campus.
However, Amazon’s corporate set-up differs from many tech companies in that they have chosen to remain in the heart of a major city, unlike many of its competitors who have opted for expansive suburban campuses.
Amazon is the largest private employer in Seattle with more than 20,000 employees across 30 buildings in the city, and the new work space will more than double its ranks.
It knows that its workers are attracted to jobs in an urban environment, but believes they will need more green to offset the shades of grey in the city’s concrete jungle.
