Three interconnected glass domes, the Amazon Spheres opened in January 2018 as the most distinctive addition to Seattle's skyline since the Space Needle. Designed by NBBJ architects, the Spheres contain 40,000 plants from more than 30 countries, maintained at 72 degrees and 60 percent humidity — a botanical garden inside a corporate headquarters, built on the theory that employees think better surrounded by living things. The largest sphere is 90 feet tall; together they hold five stories of walkways, meeting spaces, a treehouse room suspended in a ficus tree, and the sounds and smells of a tropical greenhouse in downtown Seattle.
The Spheres sit near the corner where Amazon's first Seattle office opened — a full-circle gesture from a company that started in a Bellevue garage in 1994. Amazon's growth transformed not just South Lake Union but the entire city: Seattle consistently ranks among the top cities for construction cranes, a boom driven almost entirely by one company's appetite for space. The Spheres are the most photogenic symbol of that transformation: beautiful, strange, built at a scale that makes the individual feel very small.