Six years ago, Amazon began a lottery-style competition to search out a spot to construct a second headquarters. The competition featured 238 states, provinces and cities as they battled to be the next anchor for the country’s dominant online retailer and second largest private employer.
This week, Amazon officially opened the doors to the first section of its latest East Coast headquarters, dubbed HQ2, in northern Virginia. The primary phase, called Metropolitan Park, includes two 22-story office towers that may accommodate 14,000 of the 25,000 employees Amazon plans to rent in Arlington. Some 2,900 employees have already moved in and 8,000 employees will move into Met Park in the fall.
Amazon built its headquarters in Seattle in 1994, partly attributable to the region’s wealthy tech talent pool and presence Microsoft in nearby Redmond, Washington. The corporate’s Seattle campus now covers tens of thousands and thousands of square feet in over 40 office buildingsand the greater Puget Sound area has 65,000 Amazon corporate and technical employees.
This raises the query of why Amazon, with its sprawling Seattle campus and growing real estate footprint around the world, needed to construct a second headquarters.
Around 2005, as Amazon’s business grew and its Seattle campus expanded, founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos began to think about where the company should proceed to expand.
In any respect-employee meetings, employees asked Bezos “would we ever be in a single place at the same time,” John Schoettler, Amazon’s head of real estate, said in an interview.
“I feel there was a romantic notion that as an organization we’d only be so big that we could all fit in a single constructing,” Schoettler said. “[Bezos] he said, well, we’ve long-term leases and when those deals are available, I’ll work with John and the real estate team and we’ll determine what to do next.
John Schoettler, Amazon’s vp of worldwide real estate and facilities, gives Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin a tour of HQ2.
Tasha Dooley
Originally, Bezos suggested that Amazon stay in the Puget Sound area, but the conversation shifted to recreating the “neighborhood” atmosphere of the Seattle campus elsewhere, Schoettler said.
“We could go to the suburbs, take some farmland and knock down some trees, and we would construct a campus that was very inward-facing,” he said. “They typically have a north or south entrance and an east or west exit. Once you put yourself in the middle of the urban fabric and create a walkable neighborhood, an 18-hour neighborhood, you change into very external and you change into a part of the community, and that is what we wanted.”
Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vp of economic development, said it could be harder for Amazon to create such an environment if it “dispersed these employees around 15 other tech centers or 17 other tech centers across North America.”
“So what HQ2 provided was the ability to collaborate more in depth and be a part of the neighborhood,” Sullivan said.
“I do not see us growing up in Seattle in any respect”
Amazon’s highly publicized seek for a second home has faced some challenges. In 2018, Amazon announced that it would split HQ2 between Latest York City’s Long Island City neighborhood and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia. But after a public and political outcry, Amazon canceled plans to construct a company campus in Long Island City.
The corporate’s arrival in Arlington raised concerns about rising housing costs and displacement. The corporate said it has committed greater than $1 billion to constructing and maintaining reasonably priced homes in the region.
Schoettler said Amazon intends to pay attention much of its future growth in Arlington and Nashville, Tennessee, where the company’s achievement center is positioned. He added that he also plans to rent as many as 12,000 people in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue.
“I do not see us getting any larger in Seattle,” said Schoettler. “I feel we’re pretty screwed up there.”
HQ2 has the same quirks as Amazon’s Seattle campus. On the partitions of the elevators in the constructing there’s a banana stand open to the public, where “banners” work and white boards. Amazon has a dog-friendly atmosphere in its Seattle office, which has been relocated to Metropolitan Park, home to a public dog park and wall of Amazon worker dog galleries. The skyscrapers feature plant-filled terraces and a rooftop urban farm that echoes the “Spheres,” the botanical garden-like workspaces that anchor Amazon’s Seattle office.
Metropolitan Park is the first phase of Amazon’s latest headquarters in Arlington, called HQ2.
Tasha Dooley
Amazon is opening HQ2 at an uncertain time for the company and the wider tech sector. Lots of the industry’s biggest firms, including Amazon, have shed hundreds of jobs and reduced spending after periods of slowing revenue growth and fears of a looming recession.
Corporations are also confronted with questions on what it’s wish to work in a post-pandemic environment. Many employees have change into accustomed to working from home and are reluctant to return to the office. Amazon last month began requiring corporate employees to work in the office for no less than three days per week, prompting opposition from some employees preferring more flexibility.
Amazon improved the design of HQ2 based on the expectation that employees wouldn’t come to the office on daily basis.
Schoettler said shared workspaces are more common and there are fewer allocated seats. Employees can spend only 30% of the day at a desk, and spend the remainder of the time in conference rooms or casual coffee meetings with colleagues, he said.
“If we do not come that day, nobody else will use the space,” Schoettler said. “That is how you’ll be able to get in. The desk is open and hasn’t been personalized with family photos and stuff like that. You may sit back and make full use of the space, then exit to your day.”
Amazon Headquarters 2 has the same quirks as its Seattle headquarters, corresponding to the community banana stand.
Tasha Dooley
The transition to a hybrid working environment also influenced the further development of HQ2. Amazon in March said it had pushed out the groundbreaking PenPlace, the second phase of its Arlington campus. PenPlace is predicted 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,” which features outdoor walkways and indoor worker meeting areas surrounded by vegetation.
Amazon will watch employees work in the two latest Metropolitan Park buildings to tell how it is designing offices at PenPlace, Schoettler said.
Amazon hasn’t said when it expects to begin developing the PenPlace, but it’s still moving forward with the permitting and pre-construction process, Schoettler said.
“We just need to be very careful because we’re opening these buildings straight away to be certain we’re doing it right,” Sullivan said. “It is a big investment for us. We own these buildings and want to offer them a protracted shelf life.”