If you’re standing on a street corner in South Lake Union or Belltown, chances are you’re standing in front of an Amazon office building. You’ll be surrounded by blue badges but, if asked, you might struggle to point out the exact building where the people wearing them work.

Even as it has transformed a once-sleepy neighborhood of warehouses and shipyards into a buzzing technology hub, Amazon prefers to blend into its surroundings wherever possible. The now-famous Spheres are a rare architectural showpiece from a company that prefers to operate under the radar, and even the central office buildings arranged around the Spheres at Amazon ground zero — dubbed Day 1, Doppler and Meeting Center — are pretty inconspicuous. At least, that’s how they look from the outside.

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It’s been a big year for Amazon. The company released a truckload of new Alexa skills and integrations, opened more Amazon Go locations across the country and brought its AWS technology to several large government departments.

WHERE IS AMAZON LOCATED IN SEATTLE?

Amazon has a sprawling headquarters in Seattle, with more than 40 state-of-the-art buildings in South Lake Union, Denny Triangle and Downtown.

Oh, and there was that whole HQ2 saga.

So with all that focus on the company’s future plans, we thought we’d take a peek inside the engine room of a business that employs over 45,000 Seattleites. Here are some of the coolest features of Amazon’s hometown headquarters.

Common Areas

Cool features: Startup staples, rotating art displays, themed buildings and rooms, independent local vendors, and more dogs than you can shake a blue badge at.

Tell us more: We started off in the Day 1 building, so named for founder Jeff Bezos’ “never rest on your laurels” startup philosophy that has become a kind of mantra at the company. Bezos keeps an office in Day 1, and his sayings — which employees affectionately refer to as “Jeff Quotes” — adorn the walls.Amazon is Hiring | View 20 Jobs

There are loads of open common areas speckled throughout Amazon’s office complexes. We’re told that the company tries to avoid filling workers’ days with meetings where it can, giving many the freedom to migrate between offices and common workspaces throughout the day — and spend relatively little time at their desks.

We visited one of those common rooms on Day 1’s 16th floor, which is decked out with a rotating art display and the usual tech favorites: foosball, shuffleboard and the unmistakable tack-click-tack of a product manager challenging a UX designer’s ping pong supremacy.

Over in Doppler — named after the Amazon Echo’s R&D code name — there are six eateries, a coffee stand, video game lab, art studio and a market. The company sees itself as a part of the surrounding community, which is why you often don’t know that you’re walking past an Amazon building, even though there are over 40 of them in central Seattle alone. This, coupled with the company’s self-image as an important source of revenue for small businesses, is why it has filled its common spaces with independent coffee shops, food vendors and marketplaces. And unlike other tech giants like Google and Facebook, which provide free on-campus meals for employees, Amazon encourages its workers to venture out into the neighborhood to find lunch.

Amazon is an American company, which operates in the fields of artificial intelligence, digital streaming, cloud computing, and e-commerce. Amazon is one of the big four technology companies in the US, with the others being Facebook, Apple, and Google. In terms of revenue and market capitalization, Amazon is ranked as the world leader in cloud computing platform, artificial intelligence assistant provider, and e-commerce marketplace. Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Washington. In the beginning, the company was an online marketplace for books, but over the years, the company expanded to sell software electronics, jewelry, video games, toys, food, furniture, and apparel, among other items. By 2015, Amazon had become the most valuable retailer in the country by market capitalization when it surpassed Walmart. Amazon is headquartered in Seattle.

Amazon Tower II

The headquarters of Amazon in Seattle is located at Amazon Tower II, also known as Day 1 Building or Rufus 2.0 Block 19. The building is 521 feet tall, and it is at the intersection of 7th Avenue and Lenora Street. It is one of the three Tower Complexes, which forms the headquarters of the Amazon. The name Day 1 was initially used as the name for the two buildings of Amazon in the South Lake Union campus, which have since been renamed. The construction of the building was completed in 2016, and it is considered the most expensive construction project in the city. One of the Amazon Go convenience stores is located within the building, which was opened to the general public in 2018.

Amazon Spheres

The Amazon spheres refer to 3 spherical-shaped conservatories, which are part of the Amazon headquarters campus. NBBJ designed them, and the domes of the three spheres are covered in hexecontahedron and pentagonal panels. They serve as a workspace and lounge for the employees. The domes have a height equivalent to three to four-story buildings and they house about 40,000 plants. The three spheres are reserved exclusively for the employees of Amazon, but on the weekly headquarters tours, they are open to the public, and there is an exhibit on the ground floor.

Amazon HQ2 

Amazon HQ2 is the corporate headquarters of Amazon, which is to be located in Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia. It was announced in 2017 as an expansion of the headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Amazon had indicated that the construction would cater for 50,000 workers and would spend $5 billion. Amazon invited different governments to give them corporate tax breaks, among other incentives to entice the company to their locality. Amazon received more than 200 invitations from different cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Each was promising tax breaks, improved infrastructure developments, quick approvals of construction, new crime reduction programs, and other incentives. In January 2018, the company announced it had shortlisted 20 finalists and finally narrowed down to two locations. In November 2018, Amazon announced that it would split into two locations, with each having 25,000 workers. Crystal City in Virginia and Long Island City in New York were identified. Later the company dropped the New York location because of protests from the locals and some politicians.

Crystal City, Arlington Headquarters 

The construction of the new headquarters in Crystal City, Arlington in Virginia, has not started as of September 2019. According to Amazon, they have proposed a pair of 22-story structures in the city’s 16 acre part of the metropolitan parking area, where warehouses were located. The office space will cover 2.1 million square feet, and the retail space will cover 67,000 square feet.

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