Amazonia: The Latest Architecture and News

The bidding process for HQ2, Amazon's second headquarters in North America, reached a crescendo last week as the submission deadline drew close. While 238 American cities scrambled to submit proposals and run campaigns in the hope to woo Amazon—or as Slate witheringly described the process, "The Bachelor: Corporate America Edition"—the internet abounded with all sorts of discussions on the project. Does our city have what it takes to house the second headquarters? How would HQ2 affect the selected city? Why are smaller cities submitting proposals when they clearly don’t meet the criteria? Can we predict which cities are more likely to make the cut?

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Research shows that sea levels around the world have been rising for many decades due to global warming. The consequences of this will put hundreds of cities at risk of being flooded. Similarly, water levels in the Mamori Lake vary greatly between the dry and wet season, when the river can grow up to 14 meters flooding the forest and changing the physiognomy of the land. Currently, local houses are built on stilts to deal with tidal variations but in recent years, this has not always been enough to prevent the river from causing devastation. Conversely, there are several floating plants in the Amazon that have developed clever buoyancy strategies to adapt to this ever-changing environment. Through physical and digital modeling as well as biomimetics, the workshop will investigate new types of floating architecture that can adapt to tidal variations and rising water levels while responding to extreme weather conditions. While the proposed new typologies will be highly adapted to the area of Mamori Lake, the proposals will also be evaluated as a global response to the pressing demands of world sea-level rise.

The City Design Review Board has approved NBBJ’s tri-sphere biodome planned for Amazon’s downtown Seattle headquarters. Reaching up to 95 feet, the glass cluster of “Spheres” was designed to create an alternative work environment within the 3.3 million-square-foot office and retail campus that is currently under construction.

In an attempt to “create an alternative environment” in the center of Amazon’s recently approved, three-block headquarters planned for downtown Seattle, NBBJ has submitted a revision that would replace a six-story office building with a tri-sphere biodome that will host various forms of plant life and provide a more natural setting for employees to work and socialize. Perhaps this change is Amazon’s way of “keeping up with the Joneses”, as many leading corporations - Apple, Google, and Facebook - have been unveiling plans to construct one-of-the-kind office complexes centered around sustainability, innovation and collaboration.

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