Amazon will begin transforming an undeveloped swath of Arlington County into the largest piece of its second corporate headquarters [...] County lawmakers on Saturday unanimously endorsed the expansion of Amazon’s footprint at the 10.4 acre site in Pentagon City, known as PenPlace. Plans include three corporate office buildings, retail pavilions, a futuristic glass Helix, a child-care facility and about 2.75 acres of open space. — The Washington Post

Designs for the second phase of Amazon's $2.5 billion Arlington HQ2 campus, including its much-debated tree-covered and helix-shaped centerpiece tower, first appeared on Archinect in February 2021. Updated designs were released by the company and its architect NBBJ later that year.

This thing is still as bad as it ever was.

Stuff like this makes one appreciate ZHA's superior formal control - not to mention their ability to develop/collaborate on technically complex facade designs that for the most part do not look clunky.

For God's sake, does Bezos ever think about these things?

I get why NBBJ may not have the skills (and maybe not even the budget) to make the helix thing not clunky, but there is no excuse for how the other three box buildings look!  They appear to be collages made out of old curtainwall catalogues with rooflines cribbed from the old Pan Am building in New York.

Cookie cutter premium office park architecture these days. You see them popping up all over the world now, sometimes authored by notable firms too. That said, are those done by NBBJ? Could be Perkins + Will, Gensler etc.

They all must have an office rule that requires all buildings to have at least 3 kinds of curtainwall on each facade.

It's an interesting design question. The form is more or less defined by FAR and zoning requirements, the interiors are designed to maximize rent, leaving pretty much the building envelope as the only arena of design left to the architects. There is a budget and this isn't an institutional prestige project. The skin has to be a unitized system give the cost and (likely) tight construction schedule. A more thoughtful design might have included some kind of louver or attachment to spice things up. The baseline, as you pointed out, is mixing and matching CW types to get some snazz into an otherwise staid block. Some comparable office buildings in Europe has gone the extra mile, if posts on architecture websites are anything to go by: Special glazing colors, some formal gymnastics, custom attachments (Terra cotta!). 

NBBJ's standard curtainwall articulation approach is to spice things up with some color, fins, and mullion caps. You can see this on the Amazon towers in Seattle around the spheres. It doesn't show up as well on renderings or photos showing the entire facade, but does come off better in person or with detail photography or good lighting. Still leaves room for improvement though.

What a useless f...ing TURD

NBBJ is just going through their normal design process for Amazon signature buildings. They start with a diamond grid, then brainstorm from there. I'm mostly joking, but check out the initial proposal for the spheres, then the eventual design. 

Now tell me they didn't start from the same place for the helix turd emoji. Why they haven't learned from their previous work at this point is anyone's guess. 

My guess, they've lost the institutional memory. Aside from maybe the principal architect, who is still left at NBBJ that remembers working through the iterations on the spheres first from an aesthetic design standpoint, then through the technical detailing and specifications, then through the construction process? 

I also suspect there is some loss of information simply depending on the office/studio heading up the project. Is it the same studio in Seattle working with Bezos locally, or is it another studio in their NY or DC office who will be better positioned to oversee construction and coordinate with more local contractors/fabricators?

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