Posted on 10/05/2013 9:11:08 PM PDT by Jack Hydrazine
At a Seattle city meeting Tuesday night, Amazon presented plans for a futuristic, greenhouse-like sphere of a building in the middle of its new Seattle campus. According to the proposal, the five-story, tri-domed structure will be large enough to accommodate mature trees, allowing employees to “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.” From the plans:
In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zones modeled on montane ecologies found around the globe.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I’d love to be in the room when their mechanical engineers tells them how many tons of air conditioning that’s going to require, and how much that will cost both for installation and operation.
It looks like yet another completely impractical architect’s wet dream from here.
Just a sanity check on those who hate forced redistribution and having others interfere in their own finances.
Looks like an easily defended perimeter. I like it.
Why not build architectural marvels in America?
Blue skies!
Everybody knows that Seattle gets clouds and rain 90% of the time.
That’s a big hangout for the homeless bums.
Not to mention being shaded by taller surrounding buildings. The trees will end up being “mall trees” such as ficus that will need constant spraying to keep the scale off and they will drop their leaves a couple times a season.
That's a possiblity too
My son is building a house in the same county, King County.
He is building a house that has been built a several dozen times before, so it's nothing new to the county.
They still want 6 months or more to review the plans. The county has dozens of identical plans with the "approved' stamps in their archives, some are recent as 2013.
For this Google building it's going to take a lot longer than 6 months for the inevitable money tracks to be hidden.
Seattle has had its best spring and summer this year since 1975. That might have thrown the architects in their elevational views of the buildings.
Nice. When I visit family, I’ll have to see that. Seattle
has really grown in the years I’ve been gone.
WOW, where is that located?
They’ll be hiring construction crews, buy glass, metal, air conditioning units, concrete, furniture, greenry and a lot of things to help move the economy along. It’s a great idea.
It’s good to have money, it’s difficult to spend it well.
I would not want to be in these domes in an earthquake.
Approaching this as an interesting engineering problem, how would one reduce the danger?
Perhaps decouple the domes and link with non glass collapsible/expendable barrel vault passages? Support the domes on a flexible single central pole that articulates at the support zenith. Support the bottom circular skirt/sill structure on round bearings so the structure can move back and forth on a sill foundation (a concave chase rather than flat surface?) to absorb the shock waves? Perhaps a collapsible skirt with internal shock absorber damping? Expensive!
And will the engineer who designs this be willing to move his office to the dome and risk having to catch all the falling glass? The Acid test...
Interesing...
Does it Rain in Seattle (sarc?) Another big issue that I see is the glazing on the glass “roof” panels. How long before they start to leak. This can be a problem in Geodesic dome structures. I suppose there may be some innovative way to overlap the glass panels like shingles, shiplap, or fish scales to avoid this.
I suspect that the interior will develop its own little climate. As you indicate, there will be a lot of work on the HVAC systems to prevent problems with condensation and overheating in this upside down terrarium bowl.
Seattle is overdue for a major quake. The structural part of the dome can pretty much survive any quake but the rest of it will be damaged.
Do you know of any information on how domes do in an earthquake? I have no information on this and am just assuming that this would be a problem, at least, as far as a glass covered dome.
The design of glass in earthquake prone buildings is systematically engineered just like all other components of the structure
I’m pretty sure the skin will be isolated from the ground by dampers between the structural rib and the ground
Seattle is built on a thick layer of Ice-Age sand and gravel deposits, which shake like jello when earthquake waves move through them.
Additionally, much of Original Seattle burned, and the city fathers in their infinite wisdom chose to wash down some of the steeper hills which burried some of the old buildings around Pioneer Square.
So the combination of Glacial soft sediment and firehose fan deposits makes for a dicey place to build tall modern vertical Greenhouses.
Duh, have the Amazon suits ever bothered to check with the USGS Earthquake experts?
The thing is right in the heart of Seattle’s central business district, downtown at 1000 4th Avenue. It’s interesting to note that now that the thing has been in place for a few years, the local art and architecture critics who loved it at first have now turned on it. The picture I posted really doesn’t convey the impact of the building from street level: it’s brutish, cold, and thanks to its total absence of symmetry, monstrously overwhelming.
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