Seattle's financial district became slums in the Corona years.

As in almost all American inner cities, homeless people with matted hair crouch in front of empty shops.

The legions of office workers who populated the respective central business district during the day before the pandemic are staying at home and consequently no longer shopping for smoothies, burritos and bagels during their lunch breaks.

Next to Seattle's high-rise district is the Retail Core, the shopping district.

The finest of the big department stores is Macy's, an Art Deco masterpiece designed by John Graham, whose son is ironically considered the father of the mall, having designed the Northgate Mall, which opened in 1950 and was the first large mall in America and the World.

Macy's has been bankrupt and closed since February 2020, having leased its top six floors to Amazon for office space for the previous five years to survive.

The closure of the most important department store is just as tragic a loss for downtown Seattle as the Karstadt and Kaufhof stores that are boarded up in many places in this country.

Shopping behavior has changed irreversibly.

The Amazon group has its headquarters just a few blocks north of the empty department store shell, in the area called Denny Triangle.

The world's most powerful e-tailer is profiting from the crisis.

Unlike other tech giants like Apple, Facebook and Google, Amazon has chosen a dedicated urban location for its headquarters.

In the early 1900s, the group built by Jeff Bezos acquired three blocks in Seattle.

The urban campus now comprises a total of 18 buildings, but that's not enough for the ever-growing giant.

A second headquarters in nearby Arlington is currently under construction.

Space for a further 50,000 jobs is to be created in HQ2.

The design of the three towers seems arbitrary

Amazon now occupies one-fifth of all downtown office space in Seattle, with employees spread across 33 buildings.

No other inner city in North America is so dominated by a single company.

The high-rise skyscrapers with dark shimmering facades in which the company is based in Seattle were designed by the architecture firm NBBJ, which once owed its rise to large commissions from the Navy for military buildings.

The design of the three box-shaped towers seems arbitrary, but for four years there has been a crowd puller at the company headquarters with the "Spheres", which also attracts the public interested in architecture.

Closed again shortly after opening due to corona, the three glass bubbles can now be experienced by everyone for the first time: They are reminiscent of the Eden greenhouse in Cornwall.

However, the American variant is less elegant in detail than the original designed by Nicholas Grimshaw.

The word sphere is also ambiguous in its German translation: not only ball and sphere are described with it, but also demarcation, sphere of activity, area of ​​influence and interest.

The three interlocking glass domes serve as a "lounge" and greenhouse and are the new landmark of the up-and-coming city of Seattle and its largest employer after Boeing.

The largely functionless paradise building is a built spatialization of the company name: the room temperature is 22 degrees Celsius and the humidity is 60 percent.

The laboriously conditioned warm, humid rainforest air is not conducive to the brain and laptop in the long run.