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Amazon.com Inc. founder and CEO Jeff Bezos opened the company's newest building to the public with the help of a “special friend."
“If you would join me in directing your attention up above your heads for a moment,” he said Monday to a crowd of reporters, politicians and school kids gathered in the fourth story of Amazon's terrarium-like orbs known as the Spheres in downtown Seattle.
“Alexa, open the Spheres,” he said to the ceiling.
Then the signature blue light ring of Amazon's voice assistant illuminated in the glass rafters.
With his mother, father, brother and wife MacKenzie in tow, Bezos toured the urban jungle, inspecting the four-story living wall, dropping in the treehouse meeting rooms and admiring the 40,000 plants packed into an urban office.
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Amazon’s real estate chief John Schoettler later admitted that it was a “trick” and Alexa isn’t actually hardwired into the building.
People are lining up to get in the door of the Spheres.
Public tours are booked out until June, he said, and employees who sign up today will have to wait until April to have a look.
One of the hallmarks of the Spheres is that they're full of mature plants and trees, such as the 50-foot Ficus tree named Rubi.
That wasn't the original plan, according to lead horticulturist Ron Gagliardo.
“I showed (Bezos) some graphics of what it would look like on Day 1 and graphics of what it would look like in year five,” he said. “The next thing he asked was, ‘can we have year five on Day 1?”
That forced Gagliardo and his team to go back to the drawing board and come up with creative ways of filling the Spheres with trees that wouldn’t fit through the door. In this slideshow, you can see how Rubi was installed before the building was completed: