Amazon in the Regrade, The Spheres

Seattle, WA

Amazon in the Regrade, The Spheres

Located in the heart of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, these three, intersecting, glass-and-steel spheres are a one-of-a-kind centerpiece and gathering spot for 'Amazonians' with five freestanding floors that deliver a highly immersive, hybrid environment by merging nature with the modern workspace to inspire collaboration, creativity, and innovation. The space—packed with over 40,000 plants from more than 30 countries—also includes treehouse meeting rooms, waterfalls, paludarium, and a four-story living wall.  MKA’s state-of-the-art steel advancements in the design of these spherical conservatories included utilizing intricately-shaped steel sections that are modular and repetitive for off-site fabrication.  Spanning as an independent structure around the interior floors, the exterior skeleton is comprised of curved tube steel members and nodes fabricated from curved plates derived from a 60-sided shape: a pentagonal hexecontahedron. The structure’s principal advantage is repetition—each of the 60 sides are the same pentagon allowing for efficient fabrication. The repeating piece, dubbed a “Catalan,” honors the 19th Century mathematician who first defined this shape.  In total, 105 Catalans, 620 tons of steel, and 3,045 panes of glass form The Spheres. Other advancements included the implementation of Performance-Based Fire design. Rather than follow a code prescriptive fire-proofing approach, MKA incorporated a “fire load case” into the structural design based on the maximum temperature the steel can reach in the event of a fire. This innovative approach revealed that intumescent paint was only needed on the non-redundant structural arch elements, which allowed for a significant cost savings and for the beauty of the Catalan steel structure to remain exposed.