The Office Design Strategies of Amazon, Samsung, Adobe and Others | WSJ Open Office

From Amazon spheres to grayscale Adobe buildings with colorful interiors, some of the world's largest companies re

design

ed their

office

s, integrated technology, and modernized traditional

office

space. We went in to explore the decisions behind the

design

and how it fits into each brand's work culture. Our first story is about Samsung's futuristic headquarters, a $300 million office that has outdoor access on every floor. Samsung is one of the largest technology companies in the world, but it has had a quiet presence in Silicon Valley until this $300 million campus

open

ed in 2015. At Purple Mango, this design is about connecting people and design It started out as two separate buildings and we eventually came up with this idea of ​​these two-story bars that would connect the building on both sides and really define this courtyard space originally this courtyard. in one of our initial designs and one of our initial designs was actually rectangular the curves weren't here they actually came together into sort of hard edges we actually ran a computer script and looked at what a typical day would look like in a office by looking at how many calories each employee could burn and how many of their colleagues could see and what we discovered was that by studying that, if we started rounding these corners and actually creating two-story spaces behind these curved sections of glass that improved the visibility of people and actually attracted them to those spaces and allowed them a greater opportunity to collaborate.

So how many calories would you burn working at Samsung every day? Probably just over the course of a normal work day. I have to remember what the script is. He said, but it was between seven and eight hundred, does this space help with productivity? There are a couple of things going on here. Firstly, you notice that you have a view and natural light from both sides of the space, which is important. There is research that shows how natural light and views help people concentrate and process information more effectively than if they were in a more closed environment, so now we are in one of the main work spaces of the building, It is a kind of

open

space.

Two-story layout with desks along the entire exterior here and then a main staircase behind me connecting them. The architect tells me that the goal of this was to get people up from their desks and move around and then also be able to see people and see which of their colleagues are free so they can have a conversation, have you seen really allow people to connect and have these impromptu meetings or is it some kind of goal that doesn't happen in real time? I think it was a goal, but I've actually seen it and experienced it myself and, for example, I have many meetings throughout the building from any time during the day and I always run into someone from another department, someone from my organization .

So, oh yeah, by the way, you find yourself having these conversations, so I think the design of the building really makes it easy for people to get up and move around a lot and that's where you have those encounters, yeah. I've definitely noticed a lot of walking. I feel like I've even walked quite a bit. I think you can count your steps up to about ten thousand without leaving the building during the day. From here you can really get a In a good sense of the building's design, you can see the public area under the first floor of enclosed office spaces, another open-air walkway, an open-air walkway and then the top of the building and really what you see is the office's commitment to getting people outside with the public area below and the outdoor floors here, no Samsung employee is more than one floor away from being outside, we wanted to get people up from their desks, move and leave the building, and so instead of having The cafeteria is actually inside the building, we consciously took it out throughout the public space, so instead of being a kind of typical cafeteria, we wanted to give it a feeling more dynamic and lighter and returning.

In addition to that whole idea of ​​encouraging people to come and spend time here and potentially engage other workers they wouldn't normally see over the course of Earth Day, employees can choose from about a dozen types of global cuisine prepared fresh every day and then there are the other benefits on campus tennis courts full basketball court a gym a garden massage rooms a cafeteria and the Chill Zone so this is the Chill Zone there are foosball tables ping pong tables arcade games sports on the back wall basically there are a lot of things that don't The work that is done in this room is a lot of fun having this here, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it allows us to compete very well in that war for talent, and I think it works absolutely if you look at some of the scores for glass doors and

others

.

With metrics like that, I think we've made great strides over the last few years in terms of having a very open and collaborative environment that we've created here for our employees. Do you think other companies in Silicon Valley, other technology companies? They will create spaces that are more like this. I think they're going to have to because the younger these companies are, the more they target creative talent that they basically need to survive. They are waiting for spaces like this. I think companies will do it if they want to continue. attracting that talent and staying ahead of the curve that they're going to have to consider, you know, ideas like this and in spaces like this, oh, and there are also these things called nap pods.

I have to try one. I guess I want to go. to sleep, oh not bad at LinkedIn's flagship office space, there are over 75 different types of seating, this feels like a place for maybe a very quick call or just answering a couple of emails, work or NBA Jam, yes this is your space, yes this is my space and that is your space, a lot of these seats were actually intended to be desks, so I think during our initial plans we just had standard desks in this space with traditional conference rooms and meeting rooms, but the pandemic changed how much of what we're seeing. in this space is new as a result of the pandemic 100 of this newly opened space is designed for hybrid work, a model that has emerged as the top option for LinkedIn and

others

, with 42 percent of people with remote jobs working partially from home, according to a February Gallup poll, what does a hybrid office look like?

I walked through the construction of one with the project leaders to discover and glimpse what the future of workplace design could be. Building one is the new hub of LinkedIn's Silicon Valley campus. it's six stories, about 239,000 square feet and space for about 1,500 employees before the pandemic, when we looked at this building, really at that time the main goal was to fit as many people as possible in this space, the original floor plans they required 1080 individual Workstations, the idea was which employee was a desk once we were sent home during the pandemic. You know, a lot of that changed and a lot of what we were trying to solve before the pandemic was not the same as what we were seeing at the time.

So, with the help of its design partners at nbbj, LinkedIn reorganized the space, cutting the number of desks in half to 569 workstations and adding dozens of new non-traditional seating configurations. What did you and Linkedin learn from the pandemic that would result in the space we are in right now. I think we really wanted to experiment a lot because we just didn't know that anyone had a crystal ball about what the future would really be like, so we wanted to provide as much variety of spaces as possible. the variety begins right when employees enter the design eliminates a large lobby in favor of a cafeteria you fill the hubbub there are people drinking coffee there are people moving throughout the space the cafeteria extends into the first of two areas that LinkedIn calls its workspaces coworking Think unreserved open seating, the co-working area on the second floor was added in the redesign, so here we have main work spots: desks with monitors and high-back boots with ottomans dot the space that was facing back to the original design.

Once filled with assigned workstations, a space like this is ideal for those shorter periods of time where you can come and enjoy working with your team and then go home and put in some focused time and that's vice versa, yeah , and that's fine with LinkedIn. come half the day and work at home half the day. Yes, LinkedIn's approach is that we are leading with confidence. The idea is that we trust our employees to make the best decision for themselves and their teams. Open to anyone in the company for any amount of time, employees assigned to the building who plan to work there all day will likely walk upstairs.

The concept behind how the floors are planned is that the entrance to the building is the most social and the furthest away. entering the space becomes more concentrated workers sit in the so-called neighborhoods or areas assigned to their teams, we call it that the living room neighborhoods are divided about half into alternative workspaces and half into traditional desks those desks are mostly here in the bag, it was this kind of what the whole floor was supposed to look like before the pandemic is what the whole floor looked like before the pandemic that led to the decision to eliminate the desk space because we imagine that not everyone would come to work eight hours a day, so instead of filling the space with potentially empty desks, of which I still saw a lot of new furniture, they were added based on something called the Posture Matrix.

The Posture Matrix is ​​about the amount of time we imagine a person would be working doing a certain activity combined with the amount of ergonomics to support that, so how much time have I planned to spend in this chair? So as a high table, we imagine you spend less time compared to standard low tables, so this would be used for maybe 30 to 60 minutes. LinkedIn employees in building one do not have assigned desks, instead they can take a seat anywhere in their neighborhood, but it is not hot desking either, since it is not necessary to reserve seats even before the pandemic, I believe that our desk utilization was around 30 to 40. percent 30 to 40 percent, which means that even though people may be in the office all day, they're in meetings, they're at lunch, they could be sick or just not be in the office. office, so now we're really looking at what does what desktop utilization looks like in a hybrid world, do you know what that is yet?

No, but in a hybrid office, the individual configuration is possibly easier to design because the complicated thing here is the conference room. LinkedIn is experimenting again with conference rooms that look like living rooms. What we wanted to do was remove the formality of off-site meetings and put them in a neutral position where, if you're at home as part of the conversation, you feel very comfortable interacting with your friends. colleagues to conference rooms packed with technology, including table-height cameras that reframe to better show the speaker to make them look a little more like they're sitting at the table and cameras that help turn the physical into digital when people are writing.

On this, on this whiteboard, normally what you would be doing is writing like this and a camera would be behind you, overshadowing you so that other people wouldn't see what it is that you can actually see. In reality, what is happening, this technology hides from you. so that people who are remote can see what you are writing, can we try it, let's do it right? I'm standing in front of it now look what's being captured, yes I see what you mean, so you have this new space with all these new bits of technology and different types of seating is meant to encourage people to come back to the office. .

I think it's meant to welcome people if that's where they need to be, but if that person is going to do their best job and give their best. contributions to your team while working remotely, it's okay that flexibility may not be possible for some companies and others like Tesla just aren't interested, but LinkedIn sees creating one as a kind of test that others could learn from to what extent it is what we do. If we're looking here at the LinkedIn office at the future of work, what we have is an incredible opportunity to experiment and see what happens over time and that this is a completely flexible space, it could turn out that what we need is more desks in the future and that this could be changed to that or it could become a completely different model, but experimentation and observation are really the key to see whichit is the future.

We're here at Adobe's headquarters in downtown San Jose and this grayscale building behind me might not be what you'd expect from the creators of Photoshop, but let's take a look inside Adobe built at the San Jose headquarters in 1994. After 20 years, it was time for a redesign. Designer Natalie Engel said she needed a more colorful update, do you know when? We first ventured into the space, it's exactly what you would imagine from the outside, it was very institutional from the Bank, for sure, and that's not the technology, that's not specifically what Adobe is, so when I come in here as an employee for the morning and the first What I see is this vibrant orange color, what does that do for me?

It should have the right amount of yellow actually to have this happiness, a vibrancy but not too vibrant that it shakes you up and that's why we really wanted it, especially after people get stuck in traffic. Come here and feel refreshed, vibrant and ready to start the day Color is more than aesthetics at Adobe, it's your business, so Angles and Adobe used color theory throughout the space to think more scientifically about how Inspire shades and brightness levels work, so when you think about it From a scientific perspective, that orange is kind of an invitation to the community, what we found is that we found people working here on their own, they are choosing to be a place that they want to be in, has been active since we opened it.

Beyond the cool color angles, he designed a variety of spaces to accommodate different types of work. Before the redesign, Adobe had only closed office spaces, the focus then was on giving engineers the quiet space they needed for the production floors. job. It seemed that this at work has changed as the generations have. changed, it became pretty obvious that they needed to be together, which meant the office was open, but Adobe is not a completely open Office environment. We really want to create a balanced workspace. Do you have the right meeting rooms? Is there a place I can do it? phone calls when you're not bothering others a workstation or desk is actually about tasks, that's why each floor also has spaces for group and individual work Adobe has these phone booths dedicated to special moments in history of Photoshop, we are in 1990, the year Photoshop was invented and in fact they have the first version installed on this map here, let's take a look.

Let's assume that a color picker doesn't really matter when you're operating in grayscale. Every Florida Dobie is different. Some like this were more experimental tests. to see what worked for the employees, so now that we're in this more open office environment, yeah, I think something fascinating about this floor is that there are no offices, while everything in life is an experiment, we don't know exactly what it's going to work. better for you that's going to work for me and that's why there is a spirit of innovation. What we are trying to do is be more innovative and to achieve that you have to experiment more and you almost have to create a culture in an environment where I can feel that in a modular room called laboratory 82, which is named after the year in which Adobe was founded, the company tests ideas and workplace design, including how plants sound, colors and scents can change a meeting and what we are looking to do is identify the best possible ways in the future. of being able to collaborate and when something really worked, Engels and Adobe listened, these stands are really popular, oh, they're so popular that we had to go back and add this whole row, one of the most notable updates that Adobe made in the redesign was the addition From two new cafes, they went from one to three.

This side is their coffee called pallets, it is the farm to table concept and really reminds you of what this land was like. You know, this whole area was Orchards, so we really wanted to give people a place that recognizes what the community appreciates, doesn't sweep it under the rug, the cafe gets some of its produce from the company-run garden located right Outside of their stores, we can grow about 5,000 pounds of produce that we use in our cafes and in our learning kitchens and the really cool thing is that we have employees that come and grow their own produce here on site, we bring in master gardeners to teach them different things they can grow and we provide them with seats that they can take home and grow on their own Adobe wants employees to be healthy and that means that more than eating well in their Wellness Center, employees have access to cardio machines, weight classes and this is why Adobe has something called Soma Dome, which is basically a guided meditation. experience this pink egg try it i'm getting ocean waves it's relaxing foreign

adobe

's redesign continues on some floors, but across the street the company is more than doubling its capacity with a new tower set to open in 2022. this is The new office space will look like this space on the inside, there will be a lot of the essence of what's happening here, but also try to think about how people will use devices differently, how they will get around differently if you design the perfect space for now for a tower. set to open in 2022, you can guarantee it won't work.

It seems that the experimentation will continue. Entering Marriott's new headquarters is like walking into a hotel and checking in at the front desk, grabbing a coffee and tapping your card to get in to where you are. We will find a hotel room, well we have a small table, a bed, a bench constructed with foam core, a shelf constructed with foam core, this mockup room is here to test Flex seating areas here for collaboration and additional amenities A sweetener to get employees excited about returning to the office. It's some of the things you would see in a hotel, just some of those ingredients to bring people together, but done in a very different way.

The $600 million space represents Marriott's bet. The question about the future of the physical office is: will it attract Marriott's hybrid workforce back? I took a tour with the project leaders to find out and discover how Marriott uses the space for work and experimentation. Marriott's new office located in Bethesda, Maryland, is truly a campus. tower with 785,000 square feet of workspace and a flagship hotel with 245 rooms, including 13 that will be a little different. This particular room will be a sample room for the Westin brand, so it will be a Sheridan room, a Moxie hotel room. The Courtyard Room Stephanie Leonartz Marriott's president was part of a small internal team that helped develop the vision for the new office, in part by touring other office spaces.

We went to tech companies in the west. We went to other retailers to see what they were doing. I wonder. Were you also inspired by Marriott properties? We are experts in hotel design. We know how people live, work and travel today and we took all that knowledge from our core business and put it into this fabulous new corporate headquarters and the hotel next door. The hotel-like design starts with the lobby. It was a way of thinking about how to deconstruct what a hospitality experience is and then infuse that with a workplace and come up with a formula that's unique.

Marriott, but then it feels like you're going somewhere different, it's trying to transport you somewhere, the design does it in a big way, this video screen, how tall is it? It's over 20 feet tall, oh my goodness, and it wraps like 65 feet around, which is amazing, but it also has some more subtle knots for traveling, so the light, for example, is something we designed to do queue for travel, they are literally topographic lines, travel is not only a reference to Marriott's business, but also the way the company operates. Myriad estimates that even before the pandemic, a third of workers were traveling, so for Jordan Goldstein and Gunsler's The Architects that meant flexibly building something that's on display just off the lobby in a three-story atrium known like The Hub, what's the point of creating such a flexible space? multi-use space like this, why not just close it so the desks can fit more people?

I think for you you know Marriott and also for us it was recognizing that you know the way people go to work; What we want to give is not prescriptive. People choose that employees can sit here or even work here. People really love them, especially on those days when it's not so nice outside. You can still walk and talk in X and you can even do it in high heels if you want, yes. One floor up, before the more traditional work spaces, is this lab-like space that houses a test kitchen bar and that mock-up room that we've drawn with a marker where the mirror will be where the TV will be and everything. is to give you an idea of ​​what this room is going to feel like and we can move this wall back six inches and you can really see that six inches can make a big difference in terms of how a hotel room would feel, but to see how the Guests truly experience a new room design.

Marriott will use those 13 rooms that are being built inside the hotel next door. We didn't have this in our old building. We had sample rooms in a basement and since it was in a basement there was no natural light, there were fake windows and there was no real plumbing and you certainly couldn't see a hotel room right there, it was like a movie set, you couldn't, You didn't say spend the night there, but now with our new corporate headquarters we can do things we never would have been able to do. Before, between the showrooms and lab space, Marriott has dedicated more than 22,000 square feet of space to innovation, which is balanced by 16 more traditional work floors like this one just above, there are 2,842 work spaces, most of them are desks that are not actually assigned. for employees, on the other hand, the hotel company uses the hotel model, what are you doing in this space to give people some level of privacy in a sense that they have ownership over their world?

There are many differential spatial experiences, so you know if you look where you are. and now we're on the open right, but we walk a few feet in this direction here, we have a different opportunity to step aside, so the best way to combat the difficult parts of the open office plan is to give people other options They give them options, yes, and that's just what Marriott did when it modified the design during the pandemic. Originally the workspace floors looked like this, mostly individual workstations, then 25 of those desks were removed, creating a floor plan that looks like this with couches, tables and booths.

Because? remove that 25 percent of desks and add these new spaces. I think individual workstations and private spaces are still needed, but a lot of the work that goes on in the hospitality business in the case of our company is collaboration. Marriott office is open to employees At a time when office usage is surging nationally, workers are returning to offices at the highest rate since the pandemic began, as coveted jobs fall. infection numbers and companies are increasingly demanding more office time. Marriott, however, plans to remain hybrid as people begin returning to the office. Even in a hybrid environment, I wonder what role office design has to play in getting them to come to work more.

Without a doubt, it is a catalyst. I deeply believe that hybrid work makes a lot of sense and can be very successful, but hybrid work means that you are part of the time physically working together when you walk, if the spaces are not full and people work remotely or travel, will the Investment in this new office space will still be worth it because I am in the hotel in the travel business? I think people need to be together, that's why everyone is traveling again and I think that's true for work too, so I'm very confident that this building will be full long enough to make it worth the investment. .

Cisco's renovated New York The office is full of technology. There is technology that tracks. There are 5,000 individual data points that are constantly collected and harvested at this facility. And technology is used for collaboration. Is there any space in this office that doesn't have a camera? No, Cisco isn't there. The smart office is both the showcase of the company's technology and an example of how it sees the evolution of the workplace. What does it look like and, more importantly, how does it work? I took a tour with the project leaders and attended somemeetings to discover this. The 59,000-square-foot office is located in Midtown Manhattan and Penn Plaza, exactly where it has been for the past 17 years, but in the last two it has undergone an $18 million technology-driven redesign.

This is one of the few projects where technology was really at the center. From the beginning and omnipresent throughout the process in this space, screens, cameras and sensors came before lighting and furniture, which was a new process for both Gensler and Cisco. We truly believe that technology will be at the center of how people design buildings in the future. so we start with that layer to see this technology, all you have to do is look up, the ceiling is full of technology, each of which does more than it seems, it's not hard to miss this camera, what does this camera actually do?

Meraki security camera and it's obviously recording people entering and leaving the flat, but it also has a built-in tripwire. In fact, we can count people as they come in and count them down as they leave, so at any time we know the overall occupancy of the floor, but to know where people are after they enter the office, Cisco uses your wireless access points like this one. It actually tracks mobile traffic as an indicator to understand people's occupancy of space, but it also tracks air quality, temperature, and humidity. My mobile device, yes, it is tracking a mobile device.

He doesn't know it's you, but he knows there are two mobile devices in here because I have one in my pocket and I'm walking out of the hallway to enter a meeting and the camera is used to connect employees. on a video call, then count and track the number of participants in the room, while employees can be anonymous, this type of tracking is not common, only one percent of companies in a Gartner survey of 2022 have sensors that track foot traffic, says 43 percent of companies are not tracking on-site attendance of all our employees, not at all concerned about the tracking that is possible in an office where cameras count the number of bodies in space, no, I don't think they are and where is that at Cisco, we don't.

We do not have a set number of days that we expect employees to be in the office. I think if we had different expectations about being in the office, it might look a little different, but since we don't, I think they understand that those ideas allow us to make the space the best it can be for them. Still, these are Cisco products. Other companies that buy these systems could use them for more specific tracking or they could do what Cisco does and provide the data here so employees can actually see what we do. What we have here is the great ability to show employees the availability of space.

Red is obviously a space that is reserved and used correctly. now or Amber is a space that is reserved and not used and green is an available space, let's find a space that we can go to, yes, so here is the space, here, let's go to the space, okay, let's keep that and that's going to give us four minutes to get there four minutes because in this office the space is meant to be shared, so rooms like the ones that line this hallway cannot be reserved, The red and green lights are your signal, look, this is our room we're going to. to use yes their ad hoc spaces represent one of the biggest changes to Cisco's space how it is balanced take a look at Cisco's floor plan these spaces are what Cisco considers individual workspaces these spaces are for teams in the past Our building was set up where seventy percent of the space was directed toward individuals and 30 percent of the space was directed toward our teams and we flipped that, resulting in the 90 collaboration spaces you see here and leaving only 50 desks individual.

I think this is a new era and I think that when you want to sit alone and do work, you can't choose the office to do it, actually there are around 1700 employees assigned to this office, but Cisco doesn't expect everyone to be there the same. day with the hybrid here to stay. We're seeing a lot more emphasis on amenity spaces, collaboration spaces, people coming in to be with other people, things they can't do when they work at home, like brainstorming on a whiteboard or meeting in a room of 14 people. Rooms like this are now the center of attention, so what's really interesting about this space is how the space is designed, how the furniture and the technology come together, they come together because Cisco designed the table to work specifically with the camera on it. the other end of the location. of the microphones to this matte finish that helps reflect light on the faces of the table, although what is most notable is the conical shape of the table.

We shape the table to make sure everyone has a good line of sight on the screen and can see the content. We also need to make sure that the remote people joining us have a correct line of sight to everyone at the table because that person at the end is much further to the right than me, so they should all be able to see. A single face in the way, that shape and the exclusion of chairs on the screen side are ubiquitous in the Cisco space because it says 98 of its meetings will have a remote participant, so who is this conference room designed for? ?

Is it designed for the people who are here? at this table or is it designed for people who check in remotely when we think about designing collaboration spaces like this, we spend just as much time, if not more, worrying about the remote participant, we want to make sure that there is absolute digital equality, equality digital, that's an idea that Cisco emphasized and something that it believes is hybrid. The workforce needs Something we've all experienced is that sometimes you're in a meeting and you find it difficult to get in, especially if you're the only one in the office. or the only one who works remotely and this is where the camera can help bring people closer or at least their faces.

I tested it with colleagues who work in two separate offices. Are you seeing this in this packed room? Are you seeing this entire table? No, I'm looking at four of the same trainers, I just sent you a screenshot, oh okay, yeah, so you're really just looking at my side of the room, you can argue that with all the Cisco technology and the ability to convert each space in a hybrid meeting space where the office is really not necessary at all, what would you say about that? Well, I think at the end of the day people will want to come together, but they will come together for different reasons, but for those who would rather stay home?

Technology is here to support that and that is an example other companies can follow. Do you expect other companies you work with to want to do technology first, design second? I mean, a lot of our clients are interested in seeing this space because of how it was built, I think anyone looking to build a new space will think this way. People ask why spheres and there are multiple reasons why spheres are found in nature, we see them in the Sun and the Moon. in bubbles we see it even in the human eye people welcome to Sears, let's enter the idea was that each Amazon employee would have the opportunity to get up from their desk to walk towards the Spheres and enter this type of environment to think and act in a way different from how they would do it inside an office building.

All these spaces are intended to create different work environments. When we were designing the campus, we wanted to do something that was super special not only for our employees and their families, but also for the satellites. I started thinking about what is missing in the urban environment and, in general, it is a link to the nature, so we wanted to link nature with the workplace. There are numerous studies that show that walking in the park versus walking on a city street results in you being less stressed your cortisol levels are reduced you can concentrate better when we decided to make spheres we found that there were a lot of really cool historical examples we liked all of those things but we wanted something organic that reflected the purpose of the building we found it in something called a pentagonal hexacontehedron if you look at this example, this is one of our modules that we call Catalan, it is an elongated pentagon in which there would be 60 to create a complete sphere.

I hold this 3D print of a Catalan. See behind it the large-scale version inside the sphere structure as you look at the building itself. It is very difficult to find this module because it is meant to look more like vines growing or a spider web. The biggest challenge, by far, was how to solve the environmental conditions here, traditional greenhouses, as you know, are hot and humid, we are trying to create an environment for people during the day and for the plants during the day and at night through the 7th Avenue sphere we call it the forest a company can hire like the best people and big companies do it all the time, but a lot of times they put these people in little boxes, in cubicles, they are not really working at their full potential.

One of the things we wanted to do at the Spheres was to create a place where they can learn about something different be curious about something different we have pitcher plants from Southeast Asia this is another tropical rhododendron which is alocasia portiai slipper orchids from Southeast Asia this is morii del size of a Vietnam begonia this is one of my favorite places here On the sphere, this behind me is one of the largest interior walls in the country. The wall is approximately 62 feet high and almost 50 feet wide. It has something on the order of 25,000 individual plants, that's a lot of green, you know? we are looking at during the day we have that environment that we both like, at night the temperature drops to 55 degrees and the humidity rises to 85 percent or more all the furniture, all the equipment, all the finishes are what we would normally design for outdoor use besides the trails through the forest there is also this circular path from here you can see we look towards the city so you can get the best of both worlds the canopy walk was another Amazon idea we wanted to create opportunity for walking meetings because we knew that if you walk between 1.2 and 1.8 miles per hour you are at the best speed to think Ruby is our largest tree, she reached 55 feet, it was a major task to get this tree.

Because the Spheres had to be complete when the trees came in because they had to have the environment they needed to thrive and live, we had to create an opening at the top of the building after it was complete, large enough to attract a tree like This, next stop is The Birdcage. The Birdcage is a space for conferences or just to work alone. It's an open space like all the others, but we wanted to give it some privacy so you can notice the vines that are growing. the path from the bottom floor to the cage to provide that privacy screen just one more floor this is our 4th floor it's under the sky you can look 360 degrees around the city it's fun don't most people who are being Those born today will never see the Milky Way due to light pollution and living in cities, we must counter that with as many different good ideas as we can, Spheres was one of those good ideas to not only create alternative places to work but also to reintroduce nature.

In the middle of the city street the trees are not enough, we have to go further.