Amazon has revealed its proposed design for a second office tower as part of its Bellevue 600 project, further solidifying the look and feel of the tech giant’s expanding presence in Bellevue, Wash., where it aims to locate 25,000 employees.
The second tower will be 31 stories tall and make up part of a 3.5-acre campus that will also include a 43-story tower, which is already under construction.
600 Bellevue, first announced in July 2019, stretches from 110th Avenue NE to 108th Avenue NE and the two buildings will have room for 7,000 Amazon employees, the company said in a blog post Friday morning.
Amazon announced in early March that it leased a 600,000-square-foot office building called The Artise in Bellevue. The company’s major growth plans in the city east of Seattle also include two million square feet of office space at new properties being developed by Vulcan: 555 Tower and West Main.
“We want to contribute to the creation of a thriving downtown where people live, work, and visit — not just drive through,” Amazon said in its announcement.
Here are more details for the Bellevue 600 project:
- The second tower will feature an 8,000-square-foot retail and exhibition space on the ground floor, including public access to new art installations and a coffee bar.
- A 16-foot-wide walking path /green space will cut through an outdoor plaza and garden between the two towers.
- The second tower will also include more than 14,000 square feet of street-level retail space and a new daycare center.
- There are plans for an elevated bike path on 108th Avenue NE, along with nearly 1,000 on-site bike storage stalls and 1,700 underground parking spaces.
With more than 75,000 employees now in the region it calls home, Amazon has exhibited a strong desire to stretch further beyond the limits of Seattle, driven in part by disputes with the Seattle City Council over its impact on the community, and efforts by the city to impose new taxes on big businesses. In 2019, after a prior tax battle, the company announced plans to move its worldwide operations to Bellevue.
Earlier this week, Amazon announced its plans to get its workers back to the office after letting people work from home for the past year.
“Our plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline. We believe it enables us to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively,” Amazon told employees in a memo.
That mentality is in line with what incoming CEO Andy Jassy has said about how “invention” is hard to do virtually compared to people brainstorming together in person.
