

Amazon’s colorful new towers will put a bold stamp on Seattle’s skyline - eccobay
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/images-amazons-colorful-towers-put-stamp-seattles-skyline/

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ineedtosleep
For an article that's just repeating words from the official document[1], very
little is said.

tl;dr: Amazon's planning on building a new building and it will be green and
orange.

Those that are interested should look at the official document linked below.
Note that the PDF is around 28MB. The interesting bits that the article
briefly mentions are on page 8 and on.

[1]
[http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/AppDocs/GroupMeetings/DRProposal3...](http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/AppDocs/GroupMeetings/DRProposal3013154AgendaID3744.pdf)

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yottabyte47
Interesting contrast to what Apple is doing to expand their campus. Colorful
towers v. a giant doughnut. I can't imagine Apple's campus ever being a
skyscraper. Allegedly Apple's new campus is only 4 stories high to give it a
"human" scale. Now I understand what that means.

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wisty
Spacious buildings can be a problem. You decrease the density of engineers /
square foot, which reduces collaboration.

Of course, skyscrapers can also be bad, as it limits mixing. People only tend
to interact with people on the same floor.

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yottabyte47
I'm not sure if that's the case. Pixar's campus is another example of a large,
low building and it's central atrium is specifically designed to encourage
random encounters among employees.

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thesagan
Nice building. However -- I've watched renderings like these come out for
years, as well as the final results (in person). Thing is, glass, and
especially tinted or "specially treated" glass meant for display purposes, are
very very hard to render beforehand. Actually, it's very difficult to tell how
the glass actually looks until it starts coming out of the factory to be hung
up.

My fear with tinted glass is that it often appears darker than intended. A lot
of the tinted glass in NYC, although colorful enough up-close, becomes dulled
a mile or more away.

But we'll have to see how this one turns out. Each glass curtain wall is
different. Unique, like a snowflakes (if that's even true).

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brudgers
In 1991, the first time something I drew was fabricated (20 kips of
prestressed double tee for a parking structure), I thought, "So that's what it
really looks like."

I still have the same sensation today, when exposed to built work. The only
difference is that I am aware of the gap between representation on paper and
presence while I am designing.

The image is not the building. The rendering, like any drawing, is just a
communication tool.

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thesagan
Agreed. Just like renderings I do for website projects, they're
communication/brainstorming tools and only that.

On a somewhat funnier note, every time a new massing model or rough sketch of
a new building is released in NYC (for example the early World Trade Center
massing models created back in '02 or '03) there's always a small, but
hysteric faction of architecture enthusiasts crying out about the bad design,
not realizing what they're even looking at.

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bproctor
Other than the fact that they are going to block my view of the space needle,
it's really going to be an improvement for the area. The area right now is a
bunch of parking lots, old junky buildings, and a car dealership that seems
out of place.

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rayiner
This is so much better than the suburban office park crap that plagues the
tech industry. Beautiful.

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kjjw
Reminiscent of Central St. Giles in London:

<http://www.centralsaintgiles.com/building-gallery>

And in fact, roughly the same three colours: red, green and yellow.

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bcks
Do you really need a Grand Staircase in 2012? Why make special accommodations
and a separate ADA entrance for the special wheelchair people? If you're
building from scratch, why not a unified, inclusive design that's accessible
to all?

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Evbn
Because ramps are uncomfortable and accident prone for most people to walk on?

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davidw
I wonder how they'll look ten years out, when they're dirty and faded.

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moondowner
Depends from their maintenance.

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officemonkey
Maybe not. I lived in Brussels for two years (which has a very similar climate
to Seattle) and my wife and I both remarked that "Brussels needs a good
scrubbing" compared to Paris. All the buildings looked just a tad dingy, even
the glass boxes over at the European Commission.

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sukuriant
I was about to come on here and call those colors absolutely awful, especially
since the monitor I was looking at them on was the most color-accurate monitor
I have; but ... then I remembered I have Flux turned on on my screens. I
turned it off; and ...

... it's not so bad, I'll admit.

