“Helix”: With this tower, Amazon is shaking up the myth of the dead city

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It is a skyscraper that looks like it is from the future: glass, spiral-shaped, with an avenue of trees that winds several times around the facade.

For some Americans, the construction is reminiscent of a strand of DNA.

Others consider them an image of our galaxy.

Still others see the tip of a corkscrew that bores through the earth's crust from below - or just a gigantic soft ice cream.

The US group Amazon published a drawing of the tower a few days ago.

It will be the centerpiece of a second headquarters, the so-called HQ2 in Virginia.

Space for 25,000 office people

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Amazon named the building “Helix”.

Three more buildings are planned in its neighborhood, each 22 stories high.

25,000 people are expected to work on campus one day.

Home office as a permanent state?

Not on Amazon.

"We believe," said the company, "that most tasks will soon be done in offices again."

The 105-meter-high “Helix” could therefore also be described as something else: a middle finger to the pandemic.

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One often hears the thesis of the death of the cities.

Corona, it is said, put an end to living and working in confined spaces.

Not just temporarily, but permanently.

Skyscrapers, underground trains and full bars are considered high-risk areas in a world that has to reckon with ever new pathogens.

Many believe that the golden age of downtown is a thing of the past.

And in fact, several companies want their employees to work from home even after the pandemic.

Twitter and Pinterest, for example, recently parted with tens of thousands of square feet of office space in California.

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But Amazon's “Helix” shows that there is also the opposite trend.

Jeff Bezos, still CEO and soon to be head of the board of directors, is investing 2.5 billion dollars in the tower, which is due to be occupied in four years - you can hardly make a stronger commitment to office.

Hope for neighborhoods like Manhattan

And Amazon is not alone.

Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are also constantly buying new commercial space.

Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, the five companies increased their property holdings by 25 percent - the highest rate since 2010.

Together they occupy 55 million square meters, as data from the analysis company CoStar shows.

That's more than all of New York's office space.

Or as much as 220 Empire State Buildings had to offer.

For neighborhoods like Manhattan, which have already been pronounced dead, there is great hope in this.

Where companies settle there are cafes, shops, cinemas, suppliers - and tax revenues.

America's tech giants are also seen as business role models around the world.

There is a good chance that other managers will follow suit.

So was the end of urban life proclaimed too early?

"Ideas have to have sex with each other"

“Our metropolises will experience a comeback,” says Scott Galloway, one of the most famous American economists, to WELT.

He doesn't think Corona will leave ghost towns like many other experts claim.

"All young, educated people in the world have one thing in common," says Galloway: "They want to work in metropolitan areas." There is hardly a 25-year-old university graduate who rejects a job offer in New York, according to Galloway to stay in the Iowa countryside.

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Economists consider density, as it prevails in cities, to be central to business success - despite all digitalization, despite zoom, Slack and Skype.

Where people work closely together there is more inspiration.

“Ideas,” says Galloway, “have to have sex with one another.” Environments in which different lives, cultures and worldviews collide are the breeding ground for invention.

Galloway is therefore certain that metropolises will attract companies and talent again after the pandemic.

Studies show that patents are registered particularly often where there are already many patents.

Inventors attract inventors.

This phenomenon made Pittsburgh a steel stronghold.

Detroit became an automobile city.

Silicon Valley becomes a tech hub.

Hollywood to the center of film production.

Nashville is a country music paradise.

And New York to the heart of the financial world.

The traders swear by the "floor"

New York is the epitome of density.

The wealth of the city, say economists, is also a result of living and working in skyscrapers, where thousands of people met and exchanged views every day before the pandemic.

This concept underlies the commercial halls on Wall Street, which have no partitions or doors to allow ideas to circulate freely.

Anyone who speaks to traders hears time and again that the home office cannot replace the "floor".

But New York is also the US city where Covid-19 has claimed the most lives.

In the spring of 2020, the dead had to be stacked in tents here because there was no more space in the morgues.

Manhattan, the global symbol of urbanity, looked orphaned.

Many residents fled.

Those who could went to Connecticut, New Jersey or Long Island.

Corona called life in the skyscrapers into question, which suddenly appeared like Petri dishes in which pathogens could spread unhindered.

The attraction of density

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Metropolises all over the world fared similar.

Many went through an exodus.

But Jeff Bezos '"Helix" and the other tech managers' real estate purchases might suggest that this is a passing phenomenon: density, it seems, will regain its appeal.

Google and Amazon are the largest real estate moguls among tech firms.

They each own nearly $ 40 billion in offices, laboratories, data centers, and warehouses.

They outperform several major American real estate funds.

And even Simon Property, the largest shopping center operator in the United States.

Apple owns around $ 18 billion and Facebook has $ 12 billion.

Amazon instead of Lord & Taylor

The power of big tech on the Internet, it seems, has found its counterpart in the material world.

Corporations dominate not only the data, search, and social networking business - but also, as they say in America, the brick and mortar business.

And Corona cannot stop them.

In March of last year, when the virus hit New York, Amazon bought the historic Lord & Taylor Building on Fifth Avenue for $ 1.15 billion.

It's ironic: the building used to be one of America's oldest department stores.

But the pandemic that boosted online retail, and therefore Amazon, drove Lord & Taylor to bankruptcy.

Facebook is building a new campus

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Facebook is also expanding in New York.

The company rented 68,000 square feet in August in one of the city's most famous buildings, the more than 100-year-old former post office next to Penn Station.

There and in three high-rise buildings on the Hudson River, 8,500 people are expected to work soon.

The offices are part of the new campus, the Facebook, based in California, just built on the American east coast, despite Corona.

Mark Zuckerberg, it seems, also believes in the survival of urbanity.

America's inner cities, shows a study by the Washington think tank Brookings, which is available to WELT, has recently grown rapidly.

The population in Downtown Miami, for example, has increased by more than 200 percent over the past 20 years.

Chicago and Denver have 150 percent, Seattle and Dallas 70 percent.

And the study's authors do not believe that the pandemic will reverse this trend.

“City centers provide access to jobs, shopping, restaurants, government and entertainment,” write Brookings researchers Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane.

“The forces that lead to agglomeration,” they say, “are unstoppable.” Their conclusion: diseases come and go - cities remain.