Original subtitles

[music]

[Jay] How do you defy gravity

and make a tower ripple in every direction?

[Mat] The whole building wants to topple over,

so it really needs some clever engineering behind it.

[Jay] Can engineers construct a tornado-proof art center

without a single right angle in sight?

My first reaction to this design was, wow.

I am not exactly sure how we're going to accomplish that.

[music]

[Jay] And how do you build an office

with a shape never used before in construction?

Holy cow, how does something like that get built?

[music]

[Jay] This is the age of the extraordinary.

[Amma] It's totally different from everything around it.

It's like a visitor from another planet.

[music]

[Jay] Where ingenious engineers

have unleashed unchecked creativity.

Now their secrets are revealed

as we discover the amazing stories

of their construction.

[Dr. Mabry] It is simply mindblowing.

I mean, how do you come up with an idea like that?

[music]

[Jay] To try and understand

how did they build that?

When the legendary architect Frank Gehry

was asked to design an iconic building

for a brand-new business school in Sydney, Australia,

he was determined to pull something really special

out of the bag--

a totally unique and amazing building known as

the Squash Brown Paper Bag.

Sydney, Australia.

It's a city that is world famous

for its quality of life,

amazing weather,

and incredible architecture.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The opera house.

And now a university building that defies the laws of gravity.

[Nigel] You can see it 100 times,

and you can still stand outside the building

and just wonder how this was designed

and how it was built.

[Jay] Designed by one of the world's

most celebrated architects,

it leans perilously in all directions.

Every one of its 320,000 bricks

looks set to topple to the ground.

Look at this building and your brain just screams at you.

This building does not make sense.

[Jay] Sculpting it from brick, concrete, and steel

pushes the team to its limits.

We will identify challenges not just at the start,

just throughout.

[Jay] As the design and even the site itself

throw up more and more problems.

There's an old, fragile sewer right at the edge of the site.

And if it's punctured,

the site gets flooded with sewage.

[Jay] It takes five long years to create

the UTS Business School,

an architectural vision that snakes and twists

in a way no building ever should.

So, how did they build it?

[music]

[Jay] It's 2008,

and despite being one of the world's

top young universities,

the University of Technology Sydney,

or UTS for short,

has a problem.

Established in the 1980s,

many of its buildings date back even further.

The campus is tired, dilapidated,

and unattractive to students.

In that period of time,

the whole precinct was largely one

that required significant improvement.

[Jay] To survive, the university needs to rebuild.

It embarks on a $600 million program

to renew the campus with a series of sustainable,

beautiful buildings.

The centerpiece will be

an extraordinary eye-catching new home

for the university's business school.

[Daniel] UTS wanted a bold statement,

something that helps advertise their presence

in a competitive education market.

[Jay] They turned to one of the most celebrated architects

in the world, Frank Gehry.

With a style unlike any other,

Gary has spent over 60 years

creating extraordinary buildings around the world,

including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain

and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in France.

He redefines what a building can be

and sets incredible challenges for engineers.

Frank Gehry has a way of bending buildings,

completely twisting them out of shape

so it just looks like they shouldn't stand up.

[Jay] In March 2010,

and in typical Gehry style,

the design starts as a sketch.

One of my first impressions of Frank Gehry's initial squiggles

on a piece of paper,

they were hard to understand how

that transformed into a building.

[Jay] In Gehry's mind, there is one clear ambition--

In my experience,

there's been a fear of exploring the unknown.

And it does tend to lead to banal buildings.

We're talking about breaking through that

and showing how a building can have character

and become a catalyst to creativity.

[Jay] Gehry builds hundreds of models

to turn his drawing into the final design.

It will be every bit as bold as the university demands.

A curving and contorting building

in his signature style.

[music]

[Jay] The first challenge will be shoring up

the soft, swampy local soil

as they dig down to create foundations and the basement.

Then, at the center of the building,

they'll construct a standard core of reinforced concrete.

But Gehry's design will require undulating floor planks

that are anything but standard,

so to support them,

they will design a unique system of

individually engineered columns.

Last, but not least, they'll have to find a way

to make more than 300,000 straight-edge bricks

conform to the building's dizzying curves.

If they can pull it off,

they will create an educational centerpiece

unlike any other in the world.

[music]

[Jay] In 2011, the team starts preparation

for the foundations and basement,

and immediately they hit a problem.

The site was once a swamp.

As soon as they dig to any depth,

it floods with water.

It was a significant exercise

to continually pump water out of the site

so that the work could continue.

[Jay] To hold back the groundwater

and the soft soil,

they construct retention pile walls

one side at a time

around the perimeter of the basement.

This involves drilling deep piles close to one another

before reinforcing them and filling them with concrete.

But at the fourth wall,

they discover a fragile Victorian era sewer.

It can't be removed and must remain intact.

The oviform sewer,

which is essentially an egg-shaped brick sewer

running down the one side,

it is really sensitive to movement.

They have to be incredibly careful

with the vibrations of the work they're doing,

because if the sewer moves by only 5 millimeters,

it's gonna shatter.

[Jay] The engineers have to find a way of building the pile wall

and protecting the sewer.

We were able to come up with a system

which we called

the "World War II gun turret brace system."

[Jay] This involves using a system of diagonal props

resembling gun turrets.

They hold the pile wall in place,

but can be moved while they excavate the basement.

[George] As we excavated the remainder of the basement,

we were able to jack up the braces

to keep the wall in the right location

and to limit the movement on that sewer.

[Jay] It works beautifully, holding the wall in place

while the team constructs the basement

without damaging the historic sewer.

The trickiest bit eventually

was installing the ground floor slab

and then being able to release those big steel diagonal props.

[Jay] With the slab in place, the sewer is safe.

Now they can start to build the main structure.

In an ordinary rectangular tower,

the forces it creates are transferred down vertically

through the internal columns.

But this is something else altogether.

If you want a Frank Gehry building,

you have to accept the challenge that comes with it.

[Jay] Because of the shape of Gehry's design,

the forces push out sideways, as well as down.

[George] The building would twist under its own weight.

How do we limit those movements?

How do we get those loads to the ground?

Those would be big challenges for us.

[Jay] The solution is to use sloping columns.

These are often used to manage complex forces.

But every building is different,

and this one is more complex than most.

A lot of the sleepless nights that we had

was around how we would deal with

the sloping columns.

[Jay] They have to work out

exactly where every column will go

and how much it will need to slope

to cope with the different forces

created in each location.

[George] We had columns that were starting

on the top of the building,

quite far away from each other,

that ended up intersecting each other

lower down in the building,

which made the detailing

and how we were actually able to construct them

quite involved.

[Jay] The interior skeleton is complete.

Then, in August 2013, the team faces

their biggest test yet--

creating the building's façade.

The curving buildings Gehry's renowned for

are often finished in sheets of metal,

but not this one.

The neighborhood is composed primarily of brick buildings,

and so we started to try and make a building

that really speaks to the neighborhood

and fits into that context.

[music]

[Jay] By choosing brick,

the façade material can be locally sourced,

which makes it more sustainable.

But making curves out of it won't be easy.

[Craig] The level of curvature on this building

is beyond what we had done previously.

The interest here is to get this flowing shape

in a material that doesn't necessarily want to do that.

[Jay] To achieve the swirling look,

they have to design custom-made bricks.

We spoke to many brick suppliers.

And when we'd show them the façade of the building,

their initial view was, "You can't build that."

[music]

[Jay] The design will push the bricklayers to their limits.

[Jay] In Sydney, Australia,

world-renowned architect Frank Gehry's mindbending

curved design for a new university building

is forcing the team to use bricks

as never before.

To make the curved façade,

they turn to a bricklaying technique

known as corbelling.

They have to corbel the bricks,

which means that each successive layer

steps out slightly from the one below it.

You've gotta be really careful when corbelling

because in engineering terms,

you're potentially creating a massive stability problem

for yourself.

If bricks are stacked vertically,

the forces are going straight down.

As soon as you start to step in one direction

or the other direction,

you introduce a lateral force in that direction.

And that force has to be resisted.

[Jay] This building requires corbelling

on a scale never seen before.

Bricks have been done with corbels before.

But it hadn't been done corbelling in two directions,

corbelling inwards, corbelling outwards,

across two planes vertically and horizontally.

So the challenge in the design was,

how do you make sure that these corbels don't topple over?

[Jay] As they build the walls either in or out,

each course of bricks will step out

by almost two inches.

Sloping by over 25 degrees,

these walls are literally gravity defying.

The whole building wants to topple over,

so it really needs some clever engineering behind it.

We had to do a lot of homework on how we were going to do this.

[Jay] The team turns to a local brick producer specialist

for help.

The nature of this building was such

that we had to develop a new system

to hold the bricks back to the building.

[Larry] They design bricks with a central groove

that allows them to be anchored to the building's structure.

And where we essentially ended up in the end

was a steel prefabricated backing system

that had the membrane fixed to it,

that had the brick ties connected to it already.

So the brickies, when they were laying the bricks,

all they knew is when they got to one of the mounting points,

they knew it had to go in.

So they didn't have to think about

how many they were putting in or where they went.

[Daniel] And eventually we got to a point

where what seemed impossible wasn't impossible anymore.

[Jay] It may not be impossible,

but the challenge is far from over.

On a normal build, a bricklayer would lay

some 500 bricks a day.

They were laying less than 50 bricks a day,

which is very low for a bricklayer

and very poor productivity

if you're looking at normal bricklaying rates.

[Man] At the beginning, there was some barriers.

I'm a bricklayer.

[indistinct] lay 100 bricks.

But this is the way the job is.

[Jay] The challenge of the job proves to be too much

for some of the team.

Some of the bricklayers that started on the project

either asked to be removed and sent to another project,

'cause it was doing their head in,

all these little rules about the pattern and the bond

was just too much for them.

And they couldn't stand the pressure.

[music]

[Jay] Those who remain pick up the pace,

laying some 320,000 bricks

in order to complete the seemingly unbuildable

new business school.

[Nigel] We were very fortunate indeed

that the artisan bricklayers,

who took a significant amount of pride in their work,

rose to the occasion

and delivered on the job.

[Jay] In 2015,

six years after Gehry put pen to paper,

the new business school building throws open its doors

to students.

Its magical twisting structure

putting the university firmly on the global stage.

This is the first Frank Gehry building in Australia,

and what a way to make an entrance.

[Jay] It is not just a testament to architectural vision,

but redefines what can be achieved with a simple brick.

The corbelling creates shadows and changes as the sun changes

and moves through the sky

that really makes the building kind of come alive.

[music]

[Jay] As well as pushing architectural boundaries,

it's also sustainable.

The brickwork is durable, low maintenance,

and locally sourced.

The inside spaces are fitted out with sustainable timber.

The building even harbors rainwater.

[Jay] Above all, though, this is a beautiful,

one-of-a-kind work of architecture

that in typical Gehry fashion

is as much a sculpture as a building.

[George] I actually think it's a piece of art.

When I look at it, it is so different

to anything that you can see anywhere.

[Nigel] It never ceases to amaze me today.

And I've seen this building many, many times.

I often want to just stand and admire

the genius, really, of Frank Gehry and his team.

[music]

When building a cool new art museum

in Tornado Alley,

strength and practicality should win the day.

But whatever the location,

genius architects just love to think outside the box.

And while this Oklahoma masterpiece

will stand solid against the mightiest of winds,

it's guaranteed that everyone who sees it

will be totally blown away.

[music]

[Jay] Oklahoma lies at midpoint

between the east and west coasts of the United States,

and at the heart of Tornado Alley.

The state is battered by around 50 twisters a year,

which means buildings here have to be tough beyond belief.

[music]

In a tornado zone, right angles are the way to go.

[Jay] The problem is that often means

buildings can be boring...

until now.

This is the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.

[Hank] When I first saw it, to be honest,

it looked like a icicle had dropped and splattered.

[Jay] It's a shimmering sculpture of a building

that's as far from a sensible box you can imagine.

[Rand] It's about discovery.

It's about surprise.

[Jay] And surprise it does.

With an extraordinary façade

that doesn't have a single right angle in sight.

Ninety degrees is an engineer's favorite angle.

So a building without any?

It's a nightmare.

We thought, wow, how the hell are we gonna do this

with all the different directions

and the zigging and the zagging of the walls?

[Jay] Constructing it was beyond complicated.

There's, like, 37 miles of fins on the building.

[music]

[Jay] So, how did they build it?

[music]

[Jay] In 1989, in Oklahoma City,

a new arts organization set up shop

in an abandoned building on the city's state fairgrounds.

Known as Oklahoma Contemporary Arts,

it offers people from all backgrounds

opportunities to enjoy dance, theater, and the visual arts.

Our mission focus is completely on education.

All varieties of people, all ages, and all ability levels.

[Jay] By 2003, though,

the building it calls home no longer fits its purpose.

[Christian] Nothing was built for what it was doing.

We were having art classes in what used to be a planetarium.

We all started fantasizing,

what would it be like if we were someplace else?

And then all of a sudden, I just am like,

okay, I'm not gonna fight this tidal wave anymore.

Let's do it!

[music]

[Jay] The vision is for a bold new arts center

that will welcome all Oklahomans.

In 2012, a fundraising drive gets underway

with an ambitious target of $30.7 million.

Meanwhile, they need someone to overcome the design challenges

of creating their new home.

This building had to be beautiful,

but it also has to be strong.

[Jay] In fact, it has to be very strong.

In 2013, the Mora Tornado alone

causes around a billion dollars' worth of devastation

in the state.

[Corina] Making a building tornado proof

is no mean feat.

you have to factor in all sorts of unpredictable forces

and pressures on the structure.

It's risky to prioritize style and aesthetics

when strength is really your main priority.

[Jay] The designer asked to rise to the challenge

is architect Rand Elliott

[Rand] My parents were wheat farmers

in western Oklahoma,

so I have a background where you appreciate the land

and the skies and the wind.

All of those things a part of my DNA.

[Jay] Elliott has a vision for a show-stopping building.

[Rand] The concept for this building

was to react to the wind, the heat, the sun,

and the reflective colors and qualities.

And then you have the need for wind control

when it comes to tornados.

And so this building is built to withstand

105 mile an hour winds.

[Jay] His design will also need to stand up to

whatever debris the tornados throw at it.

But Elliott is determined that the last thing

this fortress will look like is a boring box.

[Christian] When I get something that has no right angles in it,

I was amused at first.

But in the end, it's genius.

[Jay] Rand Elliott's final design

is as unpredictable as the Oklahoma weather.

An extraordinary shimmering building

without a 90-degree angle in sight,

covered in 16,800 reflective aluminum fins.

If the team can figure out how to securely attach them,

they'll not only mirror the incredible Oklahoma light,

but deflect away tornado-force winds.

Behind the fins, the engineers will need to devise

a very special underlying structure.

It will have to be strong enough to withstand the wind

while also creating the building's

irregular zig-zagging shape

and accommodate the art center's requirement

for big, open exhibition and performance spaces

on the upper levels,

with classrooms on the floor below.

The whole building will need to be set firmly into the ground

so that it can stand up to whatever

the weather throws at it

and create a striking cultural landmark

for all Oklahomans--

if, that is, the engineers can pull it off.

My first reaction to this design was,

wow, I am not exactly sure

how we're going to accomplish that.

[Jay] In March 2018, work begins.

And the first challenge is deciding

where to place the concrete piles, or piers,

that will make up the foundations.

Usually you arrange your piers in a nice, even grid.

[Jay] Instead, they will need to be placed

wherever the wall changes direction.

And this irregular arrangement poses a risk.

These piers are literally underpinning

the entire structure.

You can't afford to miscalculate.

[Jay] If two piers end up too close together,

the ground around them might not be able

to handle the combined load.

It's a checkers game to figure out

how to move those different piers around.

[Jay] The team carefully calculates

exactly where to put each pier and how big to make it.

I believe our largest ones on this project

were seven feet in diameter,

so large enough you could get a small car

almost into the hole.

[Jay] It's a slow process.

They have to bore down as much as 50 feet

to reach suitable soil

and be within a quarter of an inch

of where they're supposed to be.

But eventually, all 47 piers are in place.

It worked out great, but it was one of those

very complicated first steps

that had to be done exactly right.

[Jay] Next, they start constructing the steel frame,

which despite its many angles,

will need to be strong enough to cope with tornados.

This is going to be a very real challenge.

[Corina] The frame of a typical square building

is a neat grid of beams and columns,

all connected to each other by a right angle.

These right angle connections are naturally strong and stable.

And we already know how they respond to forces like wind.

[Jay] Here, the shape of the outside walls

means that all the connections will be at different angles,

and so the impact of the wind won't be distributed evenly.

[Darcey] Askew of those connections mean

that we end up with added eccentricity,

so that can create torsion on that connection.

[Amma] Torsion, or twisting forces,

are something that you need to mitigate.

Otherwise, the building is going to go under that strain.

[Darcey] To combat that, we have to really look through

how that can be beefed up and reinforced.

[Jay] The engineers analyze every single structural element

in the building,

choosing stronger steel

or chunkier bolts in some places,

adding extra bracing in others.

[Darcey] There is no one size fits all solution.

Every column had to be looked at differently.

For the majority of them, we had to pick a different shape,

or a different size, or a different orientation

to be able to work.

So in essence, the entire building was a custom review

of those beams, columns, connections.

[Jay] Piece by piece, the meticulously designed frame

is assembled by construction superintendent Hank

and his team.

The columns, the beams, everything was brought in,

and then bolted and welded together.

It all went pretty well.

[Jay] The final job is to clad it in something

that will be tough enough in these harsh conditions,

but also simple and beautiful.

We wanted something that would maintain straight lines,

and we wanted material that is durable.

[Jay] The architects look to aluminum cladding

for the answer.

[Rand] One of the things that I've always loved about aluminum

is the fact that it's malleable.

You know, you can extrude it.

You can melt it.

You can do any number of things with it.

[Jay] They need to come up with something special

to make it beautiful,

because aluminum's not known for its good looks.

[Corina] You think of aluminum,

and you think of corrugated cladding on a warehouse.

Not a glamorous art center.

[music]

[Jay] The team's design, though,

takes metal cladding to the next level.

Dipped in acid to smooth away imperfections,

it creates a glowing, reflective finish.

[Rand] The light changes.

The color can be navy blue, or orange, or yellow,

or green, or any of those kinds of things,

depending on what the angle of incidence is

for the light itself.

And it just, it brought the building to life.

[Jay] Not only is the cladding beautiful,

it's also practical too.

It's 100% recyclable,

and the reflective coating deflects heat,

helping to cool the building.

It's also tough enough to withstand flying debris

in a tornado.

But the team must make sure the fins

can't become projectiles themselves.

On the back side of every fin on the building,

there's actually--as part of the extrusion process,

there's a C shape.

And the C shape actually connects to--

I can't make a T with my finger,

but more or less it will slide on that T shape

to allow the fin to move in multiple directions

in any kind of, say, weather or wind condition.

[music]

[Jay] They have a design.

Now they have to fit the 16,800 fins in place.

[Rand] There are 10-foot links

that had to be perfectly aligned.

They could not waver.

It was pretty intense. They're all different shapes,

so there's a certain sequence you put them in.

We shot lines with lasers

to get 'em straight and plumb, level.

They're just screwed to the building

with heavy-duty screws.

There's no telling how many thousands of screws

[indistinct].

[Jay] It's a painstaking process,

but the hard work is worth it.

[Rand] One of the craftsmen is kind of running up to me,

he goes, "Rand! It's working!

"It's reflecting! It's glowing!

It's fabulous! Come look."

[music]

[Jay] Thirteen years from concept to reality,

the new Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center

opens in March 2020.

People would kind of walk around and go,

"Oh, wow, I've never seen that before.

I never imagined that before."

[Jay] Inside, there's almost 30,000 square feet

of exhibition, learning, and performance space.

Not only is it beautiful, it meets all of our needs.

We have more space to make statements.

[music]

[Jay] From the outside,

Oklahoma's sensible square skyline

has a striking new addition,

one that stands steadfast against anything

the weather might throw it

while looking incredible doing it.

[Rand] People say it's a surprise to have this building

in Oklahoma City. And I say it's perfect.

It is Oklahoma City.

If you knew about the place and its history,

and its time, and its weather, and its conditions,

you'd say, of course this building

couldn't be anywhere else than Oklahoma City.

[music]

[music]

Breathtaking buildings come in all shapes and sizes.

But this Seattle landmark is made up of a shape

that's never been used before to make a building--

a pentagonal hexecontahedron,

a shape that's almost as difficult to say

as these super cool offices were to design and put together.

[music]

[Jay] Seattle, Washington is surrounded by

some of the most spectacular scenery

and lush green forests in the United States.

But in its bustling downtown

with its packed streets and skyscraper offices,

you could be in almost any city on the planet.

That is, until one of the world's biggest companies

decided to reimagine its headquarters

and redefine the workplace,

capturing a sense of countryside on the doorstep.

And this building is completely out of this world.

It's fiction.

[Jay] Three interconnecting spheres

made with 620 tons of steel.

It's packed with more than 40,000 plants

from over 30 countries.

Each must have the exact conditions to flourish.

Fine if you're creating a botanical garden.

A huge challenge when you're building

a tech company headquarters.

How do we create an environment

people would work in during the day,

and yet, the plants would thrive?

[Jay] To make it strong enough to withstand

even a catastrophic earthquake,

they base it on a shape never before used in construction.

Holy cow, how does something like that get built?

[Jay] Five years in the making,

it's now the jewel in the crown

of a $4 billion corporate campus

and one of the most extraordinary offices

in the world.

This is the Amazon Spheres.

So, how did they build it?

[music]

[Jay] It's 1990's Seattle,

and the most northern city in the United States mainland

is booming,

driven by an explosion in tech company startups.

One of them is a bookstore operating out of a garage--

Jeff Bezos' garage.

By 2012, Amazon has become a multibillion-dollar

global business.

And when Bezos is looking to expand the company headquarters,

he wants to create an environment

that will spark creativity in his employees.

He turns for inspiration to his backyard.

He has, on his own property,

a large kind of Victorian-style conservatory, or greenhouse.

And when he needed to take a break

from everything else,

he would go walk through his conservatory.

We know that when you go for a walk in the park,

that your cortisol levels are improved,

people's heart rates come down,

that they're able to think clearer.

[Jay] Not only must this greenhouse office

offer the stress-busting and productivity-boosting benefits

of being surrounded by plants,

it must look incredible doing it.

The architects take their cue from historic conservatories.

[John Savo] Most of those old buildings

had the dome in the middle.

And that kind of got us thinking about

what is the origin of the dome, really?

It's part of a sphere.

And while spheres would've been

very difficult to build historically,

in modern times, the idea of a sphere

is much more doable.

[Jay] The futuristic bubble-like spheres

they come up with

will test the limits of 21st century engineering.

Having anchored them to the ground

with three vast concrete ring beams,

they'll need to build a core up to four stories high

to create space for hundreds of employees at a time

to collaborate and find inspiration.

Then, they will need to design and build

a self-supporting dome steel structure

that's 90 feet tall at its peak

and is as beautiful as it is strong.

They'll also need to find a way to cover it

in thousands of pieces of glass which won't shatter,

even if hit by an earthquake.

If they can pull it off,

they'll have created space for a vast inside jungle

and have built a workplace straight out of the future.

[music]

[Jay] In winter 2015,

they break ground to dig foundations.

Once complete, they'll quickly move on

to building the central core, which will be the office space.

Ultimately we decided that it just--

given the curvilinear shape of the structure,

the internal core structure, I'll call it.

It was better to just cast and format as concrete,

just because you can set up a big, you know, floor,

and then just set your form and pour the concrete in.

[Jay] It is made with 12 million pounds of concrete

reinforced by 2.5 million pounds of steel.

So far, pretty straightforward.

But now the fun begins--

the challenge of actually designing and building

the three spheres.

Now, how does this idea and vision manifest itself

in kind of the final structure?

[Jay] The answer lies in a shape

never used before in construction.

[Jay] It's 2015, and in Seattle,

the engineers redesigning Amazon's headquarters

are trying to devise a structure

that looks like floating bubbles,

but is strong enough not to need columns.

[Jay T] We found the sweet spot as we found a solution

that not only worked well structurally,

we knew would be an effective and efficient way

to fabricate and to erect,

but it also was absolutely beautiful.

[Jay] To create the building's frame,

they use a shape never before used in construction--

a pentagonal hexecontahedron.

It's what you get when 60 identical pentagons

are joined up to make a sphere.

And there's a very good reason to use it now.

This shape distributes pressure,

which makes it strong enough not to need

any columns to support it.

[Jay] They spend months experimenting with the shape

of the individual pieces that will make up the steel frame.

[John Savo] We didn't want to actually see

the pentagons in the final form,

so we thought, well, we can create something new

by creating a hub in the middle of the pentagon

and have five arms that go out to the five points.

[Jay] Each hub has five curved arms.

When these are connected, they form multiple pentagons,

which join up to make a sphere.

What they've created is one of

the most complex distribution of forces imaginable.

At each distinct point,

the stresses will be completely different.

[Tom] Structurally they're responding to

their individual location.

You could imagine that the ones at the top

are operating in tension and sort of almost pulled apart,

and then the ones on the bottom are heavily loaded.

[Jay] The design is phenomenally complicated,

even for the team's modeling software.

[Jay T] The time that we did it here at the office was

probably the largest analytical model we've ever built.

[Jay] By early 2016, the design is complete,

and the 180 pieces that make up the steel frame

have been manufactured.

Now they have to be put in exactly the right place

with no margin for error.

Our surveyors were on the ground,

and they were shooting the plates

with their laser surveying equipment.

And they were on the radio like, "Okay, out three inches,

down 1.1, nail it."

That center of that plate was perfectly positioned.

It was on the order of, like, a tenth of an inch.

I mean, it's just astonishing,

that precision that they had built this thing.

[Jay] What's more,

they won't know whether they got it right

until they fit the final piece of the jigsaw

and complete each sphere.

[music]

[Jay] In March 2016, the day arrives.

Ultimately, at the end of the day,

that last piece, you know,

everybody was a little bit nervous about it.

And it dropped into place just perfectly.

It was amazing.

[Jay] After 16 weeks, the steel shell is complete.

The next challenge will be the glass.

2,600 panes of it will cloak the exterior.

The catch is, it needs to be earthquake proof

because Seattle lies on a major fault line.

In an earthquake, it's not only the glass that's a problem.

The frame itself can twist and can torque.

And if you haven't factored that into your design,

you're going to have thousands of little pieces of glass

raining down on the people below,

and no one wants that.

[Jay] To prevent this, the engineers built

a completely separate structure for the glass.

And that is attached to the main steel frame

with flexible connectors.

[Tom] In an earthquake or a wind event,

the primary structure will move a lot more

than the secondary structure, which is quite rigid.

These flexible connectors absorb the movements,

preventing the structure from twisting

and shattering the glass.

[Jay] They may have made the building earthquake proof,

but partway through the glazing,

they discover a pretty big problem.

How do you put a 60-foot tree into a complete building?

[music]

[Jay] The centerpiece of the plant-filled interior

will be a massive fig tree,

which needs the protection of the sphere to survive.

That's if they can get it in.

Wow, okay, so that instituted a design change.

[Jay] They decide the solution

is to not weld the final piece of the sphere into place.

The tree was lifted up by a crane

to drop it into the very tight space.

Inches to spare.

[music]

And then put the last steel in and put the last glazing.

And then sealed up that section permanently.

[music]

[Jay] The remaining 40,000 plants

will be easier to get in.

But making sure they will happily coexist

with the office workers poses a challenge.

Typical greenhouse and conservatories

were very hot and very humid

and not indicative of wanting to work

for long periods of time.

[Jay] The team spends months visiting conservatories

before finally landing on cloud forest plants,

which enjoy similar daytime temperatures and humidity

to humans.

At night, though, they need something completely different.

[John Savo] So we have to think about

how the plants would be cared for at night.

Be able to have 12 hours where people are comfortable

and the plants are comfortable,

but another 12 hours where it's all about the plants.

[Jay] The final piece of the puzzle

to complete this extraordinary building

is to install a highly complex climate control system,

which at night drops temperatures

to a chilly 55 degrees

and pushes the humidity up to 85%.

After two and a half years of relentless effort,

the team finally completes the extraordinary office.

The challenges were significant.

But I think the final result is probably

one of the most elegant buildings I've done.

[music]

[Jay] On January 29, 2018,

Amazon's out of this world new headquarters

is opened by Jeff Bezos himself.

An incredible fusion of nature and groundbreaking architecture.

It was a big day for all the team.

I was awestruck.

And I actually got very emotional.

[Jay] A space age sanctuary that allows employees to relax,

recharge, and be inspired.

I feel more productive when I come here.

Like a booster for my own brain to recharge.

I happily admit that the design and construction completion

of the spheres is at the apex of my personal career.

[music]

It was just a delight to be part of it.

[music]