Seattle | Amazon Towers | 163.06m | 38s | Seneca Group | NBBJ

SRC Admin · Dec 7, 2015

Seattle | Amazon Tower III

SounderBruce · Dec 14, 2015

Amazon Towers I and II on December 13, 2015, the day before the former opened to employees to move in. Tower II was topped out earlier this week.

Edward Skira · Dec 14, 2015

Awesome! Great first post @SounderBruce

Seattle206 · Dec 15, 2015

Great photos!

bennessb · Dec 15, 2015

thanks @SounderBruce! What an incredible project.

bennessb · Dec 15, 2015

Interesting piece from Pacific Standard in my feedreader this morning claiming Seattle is the next Detroit.

I've taken a month or so to ponder the next Detroit and Ford. I've settled on Seattle and Amazon. Recently, Seattle was compared to Detroit as a cautionary tale. Detroit's lack of economic diversity put too many eggs in the automotive basket. First, Chrysler was too big to fail. Later, General Motors would be too big to fail. Similar to Detroit, Amazon now dominates Seattle.

Worldwide, Amazon has more employees than Microsoft and Google, combined. As the company exploded, so has the population of Seattle. For 2012–13, Seattle was the fastest-growing large city in the entire United States. Amazon, rightly so, gets the credit (or blame) for the influx of new residents.

It's not really long enough to dive into anything, but sure relates to this project.

tespia · Dec 15, 2015

I don't agree with the notion that Seattle/Amazon is equivalent to Detroit/Big 3. Seattle has an economic base that is more diversified than its ever been. In fact, Seattle was a mini-Detroit in the 1970's, when Boeing busted. That inspired policies that brought in service jobs in the tech and bio-tech fields to diversify away from the overwhelmingly resource and aviation-manufacturing based economy that existed until the early 1980's.

Furthermore, as recently as 2008 Seattle has faced major corporate catastrophe. Washington Mutual, at the time, the biggest occupant of office space in the city of Seattle collapsed (the biggest bank failure in US history). Even without the Amazon boom, that office space was would have been fully absorbed by the market by 2012, or something. My point is that Seattle has an extensive history of boom and bust cycles, dating back to the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush.

A little off topic, but the first tower did open yesterday!