Amazon.com Inc.’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) main office in downtown Vancouver has a new atrium that joins the building’s two towers and creates a gathering space for the company’s on-site employees.
The new Amazon Atrium officially opened Thursday at The Post. The historic Canada Post processing facility was recently redeveloped into a major office and retail structure considered to be one of Vancouver’s most significant real estate projects. The Post is now home to about 2,000 of Amazon’s roughly 4,500 staff in Vancouver, the rest of whom are currently situated in other facilities.
Located on West Georgia Street across from Vancouver’s central public library, The Post occupies a full city block and consists of two office towers atop the historical Canada Post landmark. The mid-century architecture was revitalized and given a contemporary extension while retaining key heritage elements, such as the exterior’s original cast aluminum federal emblems, and blue and red terracotta tiles.
Closed to the public, the new atrium is 43,000 square feet and is a large-scale, open-plan, light-filled complex with 6.7-metre ceilings and a communal outdoor space on its roof. The atrium is intended to be the “centre of energy” at the heart of the flagship property.
“It’s really about people coming together and having a space to be able to collaborate,” said Mark Thompson, partner with MCMP Architects, which designed the building and its new atrium for owner QuadReal Property Group.
MCMP specializes in large downtown office developments and has previously dealt with other leading tech firms like Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Sony Pictures Imageworks. QuadReal, meanwhile, is a private, vertically integrated owner and manager of properties across Canada operating at arm’s length from its owner, British Columbia Investment Management Corporation.
The new Amazon Atrium features a retro-style cafe, a 200-capacity production venue for corporate events, break-out areas and bookable meeting rooms. Portals and staircases connect the adjacent floors, and large light wells bring in and disperse an immense amount of natural light.
“We were able to modify the design to incorporate a significant number of tenant requests,” said Graeme Scott, QuadReal’s vice-president of development for Western Canada and the development lead for this project. “We took every inch of this space and made it usable.”
The inside of the atrium is primarily located on the eighth floor, a mega-floor that was originally the roof of the old Canada Post building. Before redevelopment started, the surface was completely covered in black tar and painted concrete, and it even had an old helipad, Scott said. The atrium’s interior now has an array of unique finishes including art installations by Samantha Dickie and Marie Khouri, a LEGO model of the building and walls depicting old postage stamps.
The atrium’s interior was designed by B+H Architects, whose goal was to design the space with a “purposeful approach” drawing on the city and its culture, people and natural surroundings, said B+H associate Sarah Piccinato. She said the project’s “roots storycraft” celebrates the old postal facility, with touches like refinished decorative mailboxes and rounded arches in the elevator banks invoking the old tunnel that was underneath the building, connected it to the port and had to be filled with concrete during redevelopment.
“It’s a very big space that feels intimate,” Piccinato said, adding that the custom light fixtures, fabrics and furniture are meant to elicit the feeling of a living room, giving users a sense of belonging and comfort and inviting them to stay awhile.
The atrium’s 10th-floor rooftop, meanwhile, features outdoor wireless access points, a basketball court (very slightly sloped for drainage), artificial turf where employees can play or picnic, an outdoor cucina with a barbecue grill, and ping-pong tables.
Notably, the atrium has several features highlighting Amazon’s dog-friendly policies, such as “pooch parking” areas with five-minute hourglass timers, dog-drying stations with towels, and a rooftop leash-free dog run complete with an imitation fire hydrant. (The Post has two other dog runs, one on each roof of the two towers, for a total of three.)
MCMP’s Thompson said the outdoor area on the atrium’s roof gives The Post an expansive character normally associated with suburban tech hubs. “This is more like you’d get in a suburban campus, so to be able to deliver that in our dense downtown environment is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” he said.
Amazon is the sole corporate tenant of the office towers, which have 1.1 million square feet of office space. Open to the public, a 125,000-square-foot retail concourse includes murals by artists Paul Huba and Orville Fisher restored from the original Canada Post facility, as well as friezes of reused steel elements below an exposed ceiling. Current retail tenants include Loblaws City Market, Starbucks Corp. (Nasdaq: SBUX) and Lee’s Donuts.
More than 2,000 members of Amazon’s cloud, retail and other divisions moved into The Post’s south tower in spring 2024, and the north tower is scheduled to open in 2026, with its uses and staffing still being determined by Amazon in a post-pandemic era when people are now working in different ways.
Sustainability was a key focus of the The Post project. Most heritage projects with big additions above just preserve the exterior walls, MCMP’s Thompson said. This project, however, kept much of the existing Canada Post structure and practised a philosophy of “adaptive reuse.”
“All of that concrete and steel you are now keeping, and you’re saving a lot of carbon by doing that,” he said.
Other sustainability measures include proximity to transit, three Level 3 EV chargers and 50 Level 2 chargers and 300 bicycle parking spaces. The building also utilizes heat-recovery ventilation, in which energy is essentially recovered from passing air.
The new atrium “is very much aligned with our long-term thinking,” said QuadReal’s Scott. “We have been building for long-term value. There is nothing more sustainable than building something once and keeping it.”
