Smithsonian Channel: How Did They Build the Amazon Spheres?
The centerpiece of Amazon’s headquarters, The Spheres are a multi-story, glass-enclosed workplace containing tens of thousands of plants from around the world, designed to help employees work and feel their best.
On the new season of “How Did They Build That” on Paramount+ and Smithsonian Channel, NBBJ’s John Savo explains how design computation helped refine the structure of The Spheres, each a pentagonal hexecontahedron formed by tessellating a pentagon across its surface. The unique project serves as a model for other workplaces by utilizing algorithms that enabled the team to not only quickly generate an efficient, cost-effective steel-and-glass structure, but to prefabricate major structural steel elements and then assemble them on-site.
