The Office Design Strategies of Amazon, Samsung, Adobe and Others | WSJ Open Office

from Amazon spheres to adobe's grayscale building with a colorful interior some of the world's largest companies redesigned their offices integrated technology and modernized the

traditional office space we went inside to explore the decisions behind the design and how it suits each Brand's work culture our first story is about

Samsung's futuristic headquarters a 300 million dollar office that has access to the outdoors on every floor Samsung is one of the world's largest tech companies but it's had a low-key

presence in Silicon Valley until this 300 million dollar campus opened in 2015. let's check it out purple

2015. let's check it out purple

[Music]

mango [Music] this design is about connecting people and the design started as really two

separate buildings and then we ultimately landed on this idea of these two-story bars that would connect the building on both sides and really Define this Courtyard space [Music]

originally this Courtyard in one of our initial and one of our initial designs was actually rectangular the curves weren't here it

actually it actually came together in sort of hard edges we actually ran a computational script and looked at what

a typical day would look like on a on an office floor looking at how many calories each employee might burn and how many of their colleagues they might

see and what we found was was that by studying that if we began to round these corners and actually create two-story spaces Behind These curved sections of

glass that improved people's visibility and actually drew them out into those spaces and allowed them a greater opportunity for collaborations so how many calories would I burn working at

Samsung every day probably just in the course of a normal work day I have to remember what the script said but it was between seven and eight hundred [Music]

does this space help with productivity it does there are a couple things that are happening here first of all you notice that you're getting a view and

natural light from both sides of the space which is important there's research that's shown how natural light and Views help people focus and process

information in a more effective way than if they're in a more closed environment [Music] so right now we're in one of the main

workspaces in the building it's sort of an open two-story design with the desks all along the outside here and then a main staircase behind me that connects them the architect tells me that the goal of this was to sort of get people

up out of their desks moving around and then just also to be able to see people and see which of their colleagues are free so they could go have a conversation have you actually seen people connecting

and having these impromptu meetings or is that a sort of goal that isn't playing out in real time I think it was a goal but I've actually seen it and I've experienced it myself and so for example I have lots of meetings all over

the building from any point during the day and I'm always bumping into somebody from another department somebody in my organization then oh yeah by the way and you sort of find yourself having these by the way conversations and so I think

the design of the building really facilitates people to get up and move around a lot and then that's where you have those those encounters yeah I've definitely noticed there's a lot of walking around I feel like I've even

done a fair amount of walking around I think you can get your step count up to about ten thousand without leaving the building during the day from here you can really get a good

sense of the building design you can see the public area down below the first floor of closed office spaces another open-air walkway offices open air

walkway and then the top of the building and really what you're seeing is the office's commitment to getting people outside with the public area below and the open air floors here no Samsung

employee is more than one floor away from being outside we wanted people to get up out of their desks and move and actually get out of the building and and so rather than

having the the cafe actually inside of the building we consciously pulled it out across the public space

so rather than this being kind of a more of a typical cafeteria we wanted to give it and I have it more of a dynamic and lighter feel and it goes back to that

whole idea of encouraging people to come and spend time here and potentially engage other workers that they might not normally see during the course of the Earth Day employees can choose from

around a dozen types of global Cuisine prepared fresh each day and then there's the other perks on campus tennis courts full court basketball a gym a garden

massage rooms a coffee shop and the Chill Zone [Music] so this is the Chill Zone there are foosball tables ping pong tables arcade

games sports playing on the wall back there basically there's a lot of not work happening in this room it's pretty fun having this right here in the heart of

Silicon Valley allows us to compete very well in that in that war for talent and is it working absolutely I think if you look at some of the glass door scores and other metrics like that I think

we've made some some great strides in the last couple of years in terms of having a very very open and collaborative environment that we've created here for our employees do you

think other companies in Silicon Valley other Tech firms will create spaces that are more like this I think they're going to have to because

the younger it's a creative talent that these companies are targeting that they need

basically to survive are expecting spaces like this I think companies will if they want to continue to attract that talent and stay ahead of the curve

they're going to need to consider you know ideas like this and in spaces like this oh and also there are these things called nap pods I gotta try one out

I guess I kind of want to go to sleep oh not bad at linkedin's Flagship office space there are more than 75 different types

of seating this feels like a spot for maybe a really quick call or just answering a couple of emails work or NBA Jam yeah this is your space yeah

this is my space and that's your space many of these seats were actually meant to be desks so I think during our initial plans we had just standard desks in this space with traditional

conference rooms and huddle rooms but the pandemic changed that how much of what we're seeing in this space is new as a result of the pandemic 100 of it this recently open space is designed for

hybrid work a model that has emerged as the leading choice for LinkedIn and others with 42 percent of people with remote capable jobs working partly at home according to a February Gallup poll

so what does a hybrid office look like I toured building one with the Project's leaders to find out and to get a glimpse into what could be the future of workplace design

building one is the new Hub of linkedin's campus in Silicon Valley it has six floors roughly 239 000 square feet and room for about 1500 employees

prior to the pandemic when we looked at this building really at that point the main goal was fitting as many people as we could in this space the original floor plans called for 1080 individual

workstations the thinking was what employee one desk once we were sent home during the pandemic you know a lot of that changed and much of what we were trying to solve for before the pandemic

was not the same thing that we were looking at at that moment so with the help of its design Partners at nbbj LinkedIn retooled the space cutting the number of desks in

half to 569 workstations and adding dozens of new non-traditional seating setups what did you and Linkedin learn from the pandemic that would result in the space that we're in right now I think we really wanted to do a lot of

experimentation because we just didn't know no one had a crystal ball about what the future would actually be so we wanted to provide as many variety of spaces as possible

the variety starts right when employees walk in the design does away with a large Lobby in favor of a cafe [Music] you fill the buzz there's people getting

coffee there's people moving throughout the space the cafe spills into the first of two areas LinkedIn calls its co-working spaces think open non-reserved seating the co-working area

on the second floor was added in the redesign so we've got primary work points here desks with monitors and tall-backed boots with ottomans dot the space that looking back at the original

design was once full of assigned workstations so a space like this is great for those like smaller time periods where you might come in and like work with your team and then go home and

do some Focus time and that's vice versa yeah and that's okay with LinkedIn to to come in for half the day and work at home for half the day yeah linkedin's approach is that we are leading with

trust the idea is that we trust our employees to make the decision that's going to be best for them and their teams co-working is open to anyone in the company for any

amount of time employees assigned to the building who plan to work there all day will likely move upstairs the concept behind how the floors are planned is the

entry to the building is the most social and the farther that you get into the space it becomes more focused workers sit in so-called neighborhoods or areas assigned to their teams we call this the

living room neighborhoods are split about half alternative workspaces and half traditional desks those desks are mostly here in the bag was this sort of

what the whole floor was meant to look like before the pandemic it is what the whole floor looked like before the pandemic what led the decision to get rid of desk space because we imagined

that not everyone is going to come to work eight hours a day so rather than fill the space with potentially empty desks of which I still saw plenty new furniture was added based on something

called the postures Matrix the postures Matrix is about the amount of time that we imagine a person would be working doing a certain activity combined with the amount of ergonomics to support that

so how long have I meant to spend at this chair here so as a high table we imagine that you spend less time compared to a low standard tables so this would this would be used maybe 30

to 60 Minutes LinkedIn employees in building one don't have assigned desks instead they can grab a seat anywhere in their neighborhood but it's not quite hot desking either as seats don't need

to be reserved even before the pandemic our desk utilization was I think was around 30 to 40 percent 30 to 40 percent meaning that like even though people might be in the

office all day they're at meetings they're at lunch they might be sick right or just not in the office and so now we're really looking at what does that desk utilization look like in a hybrid world do you know what that is

yet no but in a hybrid office the individual setup is arguably easier to design for it's the conference room that's tricky here LinkedIn is again

experimenting from conference rooms that look like living rooms what we wanted to do was to take away the formality of meetings from off-site to on-site and put people in a neutral position where where if you are at home as a part of

the conversation you're feeling very comfortable interacting with your colleagues to conference rooms packed with tech including cameras positioned at table height that reframe to better show the speaker so it makes it a little

bit more like you're sitting at the table and cameras that help make the physical digital when folks are actually writing on on this on this whiteboard typically what you would be doing is

writing like this and a camera would be behind you shadowing you from other people from seeing what it is that you're actually able to see actually what's going on this technology ghosts you out so that people that are remote

can see what you're writing can we test it let's do it all right I'm standing in front of it now see what's capturing yeah I see what you mean so you have this new space with all

of these new bits of technology and different types of seating is it meant to encourage people to come back into the office um I think it's meant to

welcome people if that's where they need to be but if that person is going to do their best work and have their best contributions to their team while being remote that's

okay that flexibility may not be possible for some companies and others like Tesla simply aren't interested but LinkedIn sees building one as a kind of

test one that others could learn from to what extent is what we're seeing here in linkedin's office the future of work what we have is an awesome opportunity to experiment and to see what happens

over time and that this is entirely flexible space it might turn out that what we need are more desks in the future and that this could be changed into that or it might turn into a completely different model but the

experimentation and the observation is really the key to seeing what the future is [Music] we're here at adobe's headquarters in Downtown San Jose and this grayscale

building behind me might not be what you'd expect from the makers of Photoshop but let's check out the inside [Music] Adobe built in San Jose HQ in 1994.

after 20 years it came time for a redesign designer Natalie Engel said it was in need of a more colorful update you know when we first ventured to the space it is exactly what you would

imagine from the outside it was very Bank institutional like sure and that's not what tech is that's specifically not what Adobe is

so when I walk in here as an employee during the morning and the first thing I see is this vibrant orange color what is that doing for me it should have the

right amount of yellow in it actually to have this happiness a vibrancy but not too vibrant to agitate you and so we

really wanted especially after people are stuck in traffic to come in here and just feel refreshed and vibrant and ready to start their day

color is more than Aesthetics in Adobe it's their business so angles and Adobe used color theory throughout the space to think more scientifically about how Hues and brightness levels Inspire work

so when you think about it from a scientific perspective that orange that's very much kind of an invitation for Community what we find is we find people working down here on their own they're opting in it's a place that they

want to be it's been active since we've opened it Beyond fresh color angles designed a variety of spaces to accommodate different types of work before the

redesign Adobe had only closed office spaces the focus then was on giving Engineers the quiet space they needed for work floors looked like this one

at work has shifted as Generations have changed it became pretty obvious that they needed to be together so that meant opening office is up but Adobe isn't a

full open Office environment we really want to create balanced workspace do you have the right meeting rooms is there a place where you can make phone calls when you're not disturbing others a

workstation or a desk is actually about task work that's why each floor also has spaces for group and individual focused work Adobe has these phone booths that are dedicated to special moments in

photoshop's history this is 1990 the year Photoshop was invented and they actually have the first version installed on this map right here let's check it out suppose a Color Picker

doesn't really matter when you're operating in grayscale each Florida Dobie is different some like this one were more experimental

tests to see what worked for employees so now we're into this more open Office environment yes I think something that's fascinating about this floor is that

there are no offices while everything everything in life is an experiment we don't know exactly what's going to work better for you that's going to work for me and so there is a spirit of

innovation what we're trying to do is be more Innovative and to do that you have to experiment more and you have to almost create a culture in an environment where

you can feel that in a modular room called lab 82 named after the year Adobe was founded the company tests ideas and workplace design including how plants sounds colors and

scents can change a meeting and what we're looking to do is identify the best possible future ways of being able to collaborate and when something really worked Engels

and Adobe listened these booths are really popular oh they're so they're so popular that we had to come back in and add this whole row one of the most noticeable upgrades

Adobe made in the redesign was the addition of two new cafes they went from one to three this face is their Cafe called palettes

it's Farm to Fork concept and it really Harkens back to what this land was you know this whole area was Orchards and so

we really wanted to give people a place that recognized what the community was appreciate it don't just brush it under the rug the cafe gets some of its produce from the company-run garden located just

outside its stores we're able to grow about 5 000 pounds of produce that we use in our cafes and in our learning kitchens and what's really great about it is we have employees come and grow

their own produce here on site we bring Master Gardeners to teach them different things that they can grow and provide them seats that they can take home and grow on their own Adobe wants employees to be healthy and

that means more than eating well in its Wellness Center employees have access to cardio machines weights classes and this so Adobe has this thing called the Soma

dome which is basically a guided meditation experience in this pink egg try it out I'm getting ocean waves

it's relaxing foreign adobe's redesign continues on some floors but across the street the company is more than doubling its capacity with

a new tower set to open in 2022. this is

the new office space going to look like this space inside there will be a lot of the essence of what's Happening Here but also trying to think about how people will be using devices differently how

they'll be commuting differently if you design perfect space for now for a tower that's going to open in 2022 you can guarantee that it's not going to work sounds like the experimentation

will continue [Music] entering Marriott's new headquarters is like walking into a hotel you checking at the front desk grab a coffee and tap your card to get inside where you'll

find a hotel room well kind of we've got a little table a bed a bench built out of foam core a ledge built out of foam core this

mock-up room is here for testing Flex seating areas here for collaboration and amenities an additional sweetener to get employees excited to come back to the office it's some of the things that you

would see in a hotel just kind of some of those ingredients of bringing people together but just done in a very different way the 600 million dollar space represents Marriott's bet on the future of the physical office question

is will it draw Marriott's hybrid Workforce back I took a tour with the Project's leaders to find out and discover how Marriott's using the space for work and experimentation

Marriott's new office located in Bethesda Maryland is really a campus a tower with 785 000 square feet of workspace and a flagship hotel with 245

rooms including 13 that will be a little different this particular room is going to be a sample room for the Westin brand so this is going to be a Sheridan room a Moxie hotel room the courtyard room

Stephanie leonartz Marriott's president was part of a small internal team that helped develop the vision for the new office in part by touring other office

spaces we went to tech companies out west we went to other retailers to see what they were doing I wonder were you also drawing some inspiration from

Marriott's own properties we are experts in hotel design we know how people are living and working and traveling these days and we took all of those insights from our Core Business and put them into

this fabulous new corporate headquarters and the hotel next door the hotel-like design starts with the lobby it was a way way for us to think about how do you

deconstruct what a Hospitality experience is and then Infuse that with a workplace and come out with a formula that is very unique it speaks Marriott but then it feels like you're going

somewhere different it's trying to transport you somewhere the design does this in one big way this video screen how tall is it it's over 20 feet tall oh

my gosh and it wraps like 65 feet around which is incredible but it also has some more subtle knots to travel so the light for instance is something that we designed to queue for travel it's

literally topographic lines travel isn't just a reference to Marriott's business it's also how the company operates Myriad estimates that even before the pandemic a third of workers were on the road

so for Jordan Goldstein and The Architects at gunsler that meant building in flexibility something that's on display just off the lobby in a three-story Atrium known as The Hub what's the point of creating such a

flexible multi-use space like this why not just close it off make it desks fit more people in I think for you know Marriott and also for us it was recognizing that you know the way people

are going to be working it's not prescriptive we want to give people choice employees could sit here here or even work here people really love these

especially on those days when it's not so nice outside right you can still get a walk and talk in X and you can even do it in high heels if you want to yeah up one floor before the more traditional

workspaces is this lab-like space which holds a test kitchen bar and that mock-up room we've drawn with a sharpie where the mirror will be where the TV

will be and it's all to give you a sense of what this room will feel like and we can move this wall back six inches and you can actually see that six inches can

make a big difference in terms of how a hotel room could feel but to see how guests actually experience a new room design Marriott will use those 13 guest rooms being built inside the hotel next

door we didn't have this in our old building we had sample rooms in a basement right and since it was in a basement there wasn't natural light there was fake windows and there wasn't real plumbing and you certainly couldn't

see a hotel room right there was like a movie set you couldn't you didn't say overnight there but now with our new corporate headquarters we can do things we never could have done before

between the sample rooms and the lab space Marriott has devoted more than 22 000 square feet of space to Innovation that's balanced with 16 more traditional

work floors like this one just upstairs there are 2842 workspaces most of those are desks which aren't actually assigned to employees instead the hotel company

uses the hoteling model what are you doing in this space to give people some level of privacy in some sense that they have ownership over their world it's a

lot of differential spatial experiences so you know if you look at where you and I are now we're in the open right but we walk a few feet this direction over here we're in a different opportunity to pull

aside so the best way to combat the hard parts of the open Office plan is to give people other options give them Choice yeah and that's just what Marriott did when it tweaked the design during the

pandemic originally the workspace floors looked like this mostly individual workstations then 25 of those desks were removed creating a floor plan that looks

like this with couches tables and booths why take away that 25 percent of desks and add these new spaces I think you still do need in individual workstations

and private space right but much of the work that's done in the hotel business in the case of our company is collaboration Marriott's office opened to employees at a time when office use

is on the rise nationally workers are returning to offices at the highest rate since the pandemic began as coveted infection numbers fall and companies increasingly mandate in office time

Marriott however plans to stay hybrid as people start to come back to the office even in a hybrid environment I wonder what role office design has to play in getting them to come to work more it's a

catalyst for sure I deeply believe that hybrid work makes a lot of sense and it can be very successful but hybrid work does mean that you are part of the time working physically together when you

walk around if spaces aren't full and people are working remote or traveling will the investment in this new office space still feel worth it because I'm in

the hotel in the travel business I believe people need to be together that's why everyone's traveling again right and I think that's true in the case of work as well so I'm very confident that this building will be

full enough of the time to be well worth the investment [Music] Cisco's revamped New York office is packed with technology there's Tech that

tracks there's 5 000 individual data points that are being constantly collected and harvested in this facility and Tech used for collaboration is there any space in this office that doesn't

have a camera no there isn't Cisco's smart office is both the Showcase of the company's technology and an example of how it sees the workplace evolving so how does it look and more importantly

how does it work I took a tour with the Project's leaders and popped into a few meetings to find out this goes 59 000 square foot office sits in Midtown Manhattan and one Penn Plaza

exactly where it's been for the last 17 years but in the last two it's undergone an 18 million dollar Tech driven redesign this is one of the few projects where technology was really at the very

beginning and pervasive throughout the entire process in this space the screens cameras and sensors came before the lighting and Furniture which was a new

process for both Gensler and Cisco we really think technology is going to be at the heart of how people design buildings moving forward so we started it with that layer to see this Tech all

you have to do is look up the ceiling is littered with tech Each of which doing more than it might appear it's not hard to miss this camera what does this camera do actually this was a Meraki security camera and obviously it's

recording people coming in and out of the floor but it's also got a trip wire built in we can actually count people as they come in and decrement as they leave so at any given time we know that the overall occupancy of the floor but to

know where people are after they enter the office Cisco uses its wireless access points like this one it's actually traffic tracking mobile devices as a proxy for understanding occupancy of space in people but it's also

tracking air quality temperature and humidity is it tracking my mobile device right yeah it's tracking a mobile device it doesn't know it's you but it knows there are two mobile devices here because I have one in my pocket as well

leave the hallway to enter a meeting and the camera is used to connect employees on video call then pick up the count tracking the number of participants in the room while employees may be anonymous this

type of tracking isn't common just one percent of companies in a 2022 Gartner poll have sensors that track foot traffic 43 percent of companies say they aren't tracking on-site attendance at

all our employees at all concerned about the tracking that's possible in an office where cameras count the number of bodies in the space no I don't believe they are and where that is

at Cisco we don't have a set number of days that we expect employees to be in the office I think if we had different expectations around being in the office

it may feel a little bit different but because we don't I think they understand that those insights allow us to make the space the best that it can be for them still these are Cisco products other

companies that purchase these systems could use them for more specific tracking or they could do as Cisco does and feed the data here for employees to see really what we have here is the

great ability to show employees space availability red is obviously a space that is booked and being used right now or Amber is a space that's booked and not being used and green is an available

space let's find a space that we can go yeah so so here's the space right here let's we'll go to the space okay let's hold that and that's going to give us four minutes to get over there four

minutes because in this office space is meant to be shared so rooms like the ones lining this Hall aren't bookable the red and green lights are your signal see this is our room that we're going to

use yep it's ad hoc spaces represent one of the biggest changes to Cisco's space how it's balanced take a look at Cisco's floor plan these spaces are what Cisco

considers individual workspaces these spaces are for teams in the past our building was set up where seventy percent of the space was targeted toward

individuals and 30 of the space was targeted to our teams and we flipped that that resulted in the 90 collaboration spaces seen here and left

just 50 individual desks I think this is a new era and I think that when you want to sit by yourself and get work done you may not choose the office to do that

there are actually about 1700 employees assigned to this office but Cisco doesn't expect that they'll all be in on the same day with hybrid here to stay we're seeing so much more emphasis on

amenity spaces collaboration spaces people are coming in to be with other people the things that they can't do when they're working at home things like brainstorming on a whiteboard or meeting in a 14-person room room like this one

are now the focus so what's really interesting about this space is how the space design how the furnishings and the technology all come together they come together because Cisco designed the table to work specifically with the

camera at the other end from the placement of the microphones to this matte finish which helps reflect light up onto the faces of the table most noticeable though is the table's tapered

shape we shape the table to make sure everybody has a line of sight on the display all right and can see content and we also have make sure that people that are remote

that are joining us actually have line of sight of everybody at the table right because that person all the way at the end is much further to the right than I am so they should be able to see every

single face down the road that shape and the exclusion of chairs on the screen side is pervasive in Cisco space because it says 98 of its meetings will have a remote participant so who is this

conference room designed for is it designed for the people who are here at this table or is it designed for the people who are signing in remotely when we think about designing collaboration spaces like this we spend as much time

if not more about worrying about the remote participant we want to make sure there's absolute digital equality digital equality that's an idea that Cisco stressed and something it thinks

it's hybrid Workforce needs something that we have all experienced is sometimes you're in a meeting and you're having a hard time breaking in and especially if you happen to be the only

one in the office or the only one working remotely and here's where the camera can help bring people or at least their faces closer I tested it with colleagues who work in two separate

offices are you seeing this this full room are you seeing this whole table no I'm seeing four trainers same I just sent you a screen grab oh okay yeah so

it's really you're really only seeing like my my side of the room there is an argument to be made that with all of Cisco's technology and the

ability to make every space into a hybrid meeting space that the office isn't really needed at all what would you say to that well I think the at the end of the day people will want to come together but they're going to come

together for different reasons but for those who'd rather stay home the tech is here to support that and that's an example that other companies may follow so do you expect other companies you

work with to want to do Tech first design second absolutely I mean so many of our clients are interested in seeing this space because of how this was built I think anyone that's looking to build a

new space is going to think this way people ask why spheres and there are multiple reasons the Spheres are found in nature we see in the Sun and the Moon

we see it in bubbles we see it even in the people of the human eye welcome to the Sears let's go inside the idea was that every Amazon employee had the opportunity to get up from their

desk to walk over to the Spheres and to come into this kind of environment to think and act differently than they would in the inside an office building all of

these spaces are intended to create different work environments when we were designing the campus we wanted to do something that was super special not just for our employees and

their families but also for satellites I started thinking about what's missing from the urban environment and it's generally a link to Nature and so we

wanted to link nature to the workplace there's ample studies that show that walking in the Park versus walking on a city street results in you being less

stressed your cortisol levels are reduced you can concentrate better when we decided to do spheres we found there were many really attractive historical examples we liked all those

things but we wanted something organic to reflect the purpose of the building we found it in something called a pentagonal hexacontehedron if you look at this this example this is one of our

modules we call a Catalan it's an elongated Pentagon in which there would be 60 in order to create an entire sphere is I hold this this 3D print up of a

Catalan you'll see behind it the large-scale version of it that's inside the sphere structure as you look at the building itself it's very hard to find this module because it's intended to look more like Vines growing or a spider web

[Music] the biggest challenge by far was how to solve the environmental conditions here traditional greenhouses as you know are hot and humid we're trying to create an

environment for people during the day and that it's for plants day and at night [Music] through the 7th Avenue sphere we call it

the forest a company can hire like the best people and big companies do it all the time but oftentimes they they kind of put these people in little boxes right in cubicles

they're really not working at their fullest potential one of the things we wanted to do in the Spheres was to create a place where they could learn about something different be

curious about something different we have Southeast Asian pitcher plants this is another tropical Rhododendron which is alocasia portiai slipper orchids from Southeast Asia this is begonia size

morii from Vietnam this is one of my favorite spots here in the sphere is this behind me is one of the largest indoor living walls in the country the wall stands about 62 feet tall almost 50

feet wide it has something in the order of 25 000 individual plants on it that's a lot of green you know that we're looking at during the day we have that environment

that both of us like in at night the temperature lowers to 55 degrees and the humidity goes up to 85 percent or more all the furniture all the equipment all the finishes

are what we would normally design for outdoor use in addition to the paths through the forest there's also this ring path from here you can see that we look out to the city so you get the best

of both worlds the canopy walk was another idea of Amazon's we wanted to create the opportunity for walking meetings because

we knew that if you are walking between 1.2 and 1.8 miles per hour you're at the best speed at which to think Ruby is our largest tree

she came in at 55 feet it was a major task to get this tree in because the Spheres had to be complete when the trees came in because they had to have the environment they needed to thrive and live we had to create an

opening at the top of the building after it was complete big enough to pull in a tree like this the next stop is The Birdcage The Birdcage is a space for conferencing or

to just work alone it is a space that is open like all the rest but we wanted to give it some privacy so you'll notice the vines that are growing up all the way from the floor below up onto the birdcage to provide that privacy screen

just one more floor [Music] this is our fourth floor it's under the sky

you can look 360 Degrees around the city it's kind of fun isn't it majority of people that are being born today will never see the Milky Way because of light pollution and living in

cities we need to counteract that with as many different good ideas as we can the Spheres was one of those good ideas to not only create alternative places to

work but to reintroduce nature into the middle of the city street trees are not enough we need to go farther