Amazon's new build will resemble the Amazon
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}File photo (REUTERS/Rick Wilking)
Amazon is revamping its Seattle headquarters, adding several new buildings, including a 524-foot-tall tower with a dog park perched on top, per Silicon Beat. But the pièce de résistance is a skeletal-like structure made up of three conjoined spheres (Bloomberg likens them to "melted-together Milk Duds"), to be filled with 3,000 species of plants by its completion in 2018.
Employees—whether public tours will come is to be determined—will enjoy a five-story "living wall"; an indoor creek; a 45-foot fig tree; and treetop suspension bridges connecting "treehouses," or rooms walled in vines.
The New York Times speaks with Ron Gagliardo, the horticulturist currently growing many of the cloud-forest plants—Ecuadorean orchids, carnivorous pitcher plants—destined for the spheres in greenhouses in the Seattle suburbs.
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Perhaps Amazon is familiar with a decade-old study cited by the Times that found workers who had a view of nature had a 20% reduction in sick leave.
Or perhaps it's just trying to give workers what it thinks they want. "We wanted to create a place employees would be proud of and proud to bring their families," an Amazon rep tells Bloomberg.
"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." Seattle's downtown is already dominated by some 30 Amazon buildings.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The new construction projects will give Amazon 10 million square feet of office space, or 15% of the city's inventory, per Bloomberg, which calls the spheres "Amazon's boldest statement yet in the first project it's building from the ground up."
This article originally appeared on Newser: Amazon's New Building Will Resemble ... the Amazon