Welcome to the Doppler and Meeting Center Breezeway! If you step inside of Doppler, on this level, you can see the literature wall featuring selected texts of human discovery and exploration into the unknown. This artwork is arranged up the stairwell chronologically and situated in a pattern that, as a barcode, spells Amazon.
Did you know that at Amazon we have 16 Leadership Principles? These steer the entire company’s way of thinking and building. Two come to mind when viewing this work: Think Big and Learn and Be Curious. At Amazon we believe that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that leaders are never done learning or exploring. This installation includes excerpts of The Odyssey in the original Greek, Ramayana in the original Sanskrit, Journey to the West in the original Chinese, Journals of Lewis and Clark in the original English, as well as transcripts from Apollo 11, and the words “Day One” in 8-bit binary, as a nod to the Amazon culture of considering every day as the first one. These works inspire us to Think Big and move to the next frontier.
In the spirit of Thinking Big, Amazon started Amazon Studios as a big idea in 2010. Upstairs in the Doppler lobby is a display case of Prime Video and Amazon Studio’s awards from the past decade. These awards include the 2015 Golden Globe for Transparent, the first major award for a show produced by a streaming media service.
Speaking of winning awards, across the Breezeway you may notice an aluminum frame with a large vinyl print looking something like a homage to the Pacific Northwest. This is local artist Sasha Barr’s work called One Sky Above Us. Sasha is a Seattle-based designer, illustrator, skateboarder, and Grammy Award-winning art director. Amazon commissioned this piece in 2020 to highlight the beautiful landscape of the Pacific Northwest. In Sasha’s words “I find this confluence of nature and urban-ism stimulating- the sharp lines, distant horizons, and dense landscapes are a muse for my illustration style.”
Visitors also often notice that Doppler has fins. When it was built, a rumor around Puget Sound was that Doppler’s fins were designed to cut down on wind through the corridor. After investigation we are happy to report that Doppler’s fins are simply a design aesthetic that, we believe, brings a little color to some of the cloudy days here in Puget Sound!
