Six years ago, Amazon kicked off a sweepstakes-style contest in quest of where to construct a second headquarters. The competition drew bids from 238 states, provinces and cities vying to be the subsequent anchor for the nation’s dominant online retailer and second-largest private employer.
This week, Amazon formally opened the doors of the primary a part of its recent East Coast headquarters, dubbed HQ2, in northern Virginia. The primary phase, called Metropolitan Park, includes two 22-story office towers, which might accommodate 14,000 of the 25,000 employees Amazon plans to bring on in Arlington. About 2,900 employees have already moved in, and Met Park might be occupied by 8,000 employees in the autumn.
Amazon built its headquarters in Seattle in 1994 partly due to area’s deep pool of tech talent and the presence of Microsoft in nearby Redmond, Washington. The corporate’s Seattle campus now spans tens of tens of millions of square feet across greater than 40 office buildings, and the greater Puget Sound area has 65,000 corporate and technical Amazon employees.
It raises the query why Amazon, with its sprawling campus in Seattle and a growing real estate footprint globally, needed to construct a second headquarters.
Around 2005, as Amazon’s business grew and its campus ballooned in Seattle, founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos began to think about where the corporate should expand next.
In any respect-hands meetings, employees would ask Bezos “if we’d ever be in a single location at one time,” said John Schoettler, Amazon’s real estate chief, in an interview.
“I believe that there was a romantic notion that we as an organization would only be so big that we would all fit inside one constructing,” Schoettler said. “[Bezos] had said, well, we now have long-term leases and when those leases come up, I’ll work with John and the true estate team and we’ll determine what to do next.”
John Schoettler, Amazon’s vp of world real estate and facilities, walks Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin through HQ2.
Tasha Dooley
Originally, Bezos suggested Amazon stay across the Puget Sound area, however the conversation then shifted to recreating the “neighborhood” feel of its Seattle campus elsewhere, Schoettler said.
“We could have gone out to the suburbs and we could have taken some farmland and knocked some trees down, and we’d’ve built a campus that might have been very inward-looking,” he said. “They often have a north or south entrance and exit east or west. If you put yourself in the midst of the urban fabric and create a walkable neighborhood, an 18-hour district, you grow to be very outward, and also you grow to be very a part of the community, and that is what we wanted.”
Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vp of economic development, said it will have been harder for Amazon to create that form of environment had it “sprinkled these employees around 15 other tech hubs or 17 other tech hubs around North America.”
“So what HQ2 has provided is the chance for that more in-depth collaboration and being a part of a neighborhood,” Sullivan said.
‘I do not see us getting larger in Seattle in any way’
Amazon’s highly publicized seek for a second headquarters has faced some challenges. In 2018, Amazon announced it will split HQ2 between Latest York’s Long Island City neighborhood, and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia. But after public and political outcry, Amazon canceled its plans to construct a company campus in Long Island City.
The corporate’s arrival in Arlington has generated concerns of rising housing costs and displacement. The corporate said it has committed greater than $1 billion to construct and preserve reasonably priced homes within the region.
Schoettler said Amazon intends to focus much of its future growth in Arlington and in Nashville, Tennessee, where the corporate’s logistics hub is predicated. It also plans to rent as many as 12,000 people within the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, he added.
“I do not see us getting larger in Seattle in any way,” Schoettler said. “I believe that we’re just about tapped on the market.”
HQ2 has a few of the same quirks as Amazon’s Seattle campus. There is a community banana stand staffed by “banistas” and white boards on the partitions of constructing elevators. Amazon has a dog-friendly vibe at its Seattle office, which carried over to Metropolitan Park, where there is a public dog park, and a gallery wall of the dogs of Amazon employees. The towers feature plant-filled terraces and a rooftop urban farm that echoes the texture of the “Spheres,” botanical gardenlike workspaces that anchor Amazon’s Seattle office.
Metropolitan Park is the primary phase of Amazon’s recent Arlington headquarters, called HQ2.
Tasha Dooley
Amazon is opening HQ2 at an uncertain time for the corporate and the broader tech sector. Lots of the largest firms within the industry, including Amazon, have eliminated 1000’s of jobs and reined in spending following periods of slowing revenue growth and fears of a recession ahead.
Corporations have also been confronting questions on what work looks like in a post-pandemic environment. Many employees have grown accustomed to working from home and have been reluctant to return to the office. Amazon last month began requiring corporate employees to work from the office not less than three days every week, which generated pushback from some employees preferring greater flexibility.
Amazon tweaked the design of HQ2 across the expectation that employees would not be coming into the office every single day.
Communal work spaces are more common, and there is less assigned seating, Schoettler said. Employees may only be at a desk 30% of the day, with the remaining of their time spent in conference rooms, or having casual coffee meetings with coworkers, he said.
“If we do not are available in that day, nobody else will utilize the space,” Schoettler said. “And in order that way, you possibly can are available in, the desk is open and it isn’t been personalized with family photos and that form of thing. You’ll be able to sit down and absolutely utilize the space, after which go off about your day.”
Amazon’s HQ2 features a few of the same quirks as its Seattle headquarters, like a community banana stand.
Tasha Dooley
The shift to a hybrid working environment has also influenced the further development of HQ2. Amazon in March said it had pushed out the groundbreaking of PenPlace, the second phase of its Arlington campus. PenPlace is anticipated to incorporate three 22-story office buildings, greater than 100,000 square feet of retail space and a 350-foot-tall tower, called “The Helix,” that features outdoor walkways and inside meeting areas for workers surrounded by vegetation.
Amazon will observe how employees work within the two recent Metropolitan Park buildings to tell the way it designs the offices at PenPlace, Schoettler said.
Amazon didn’t say when it expects to start development of PenPlace, but it surely is continuous to maneuver forward with the permitting and preconstruction process, Schoettler said.
“We just need to be really mindful, since we’re just opening these buildings, to ensure that we’re doing it right,” Sullivan said. “These are large investments for us. We own these buildings, and we wish to offer them a protracted shelf life.”