Behind the Doors of Microsoft?s Building 87
Go inside Microsoft's Building 87 with us.
I’m standing in the quietest room on earth with Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s head of design, and Hundraj Gopal, the speech/hearing scientist and principal force behind the creation of this chamber. The two seem barely able to contain a giddy palpable excitement as they ready me for an unusual experience of the senses. “Are you ready"” they’ll ask with a magician’s dramatic pause, before closing the enormous padded bank vault-like door and completely enveloping us in a morass of darkness and silence.
Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s head of design, with unnamed Microsoft employee.
The anechoic chamber is located deep inside Microsoft’s Building 87 ? or “B87” as it’s commonly referred to on campus ? one of 125 buildings that has populated the Microsoft’s 500-acre Redmond, Washington campus. Despite its unassuming exterior (a concrete box exterior imagined as ‘Brutalist lite’), Building 87 is special, with a unique reputation amongst an ocean of other buildings dedicated to more pragmatic endeavors and purposes of operating one of the largest technology companies on earth. The building is observed as an oasis where “the cool stuff happens”.
Within B87 a team of designers led by Groene are given a high ceiling to explore ideas, design prototypes, and investigate properties of materials to a degree only an $825 billion dollar compan...
I’m standing in the quietest room on earth with Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s head of design, and Hundraj Gopal, the speech/hearing scientist and principal force behind the creation of this chamber. The two seem barely able to contain a giddy palpable excitement as they ready me for an unusual experience of the senses. “Are you ready"” they’ll ask with a magician’s dramatic pause, before closing the enormous padded bank vault-like door and completely enveloping us in a morass of darkness and silence.
Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s head of design, with unnamed Microsoft employee.
The anechoic chamber is located deep inside Microsoft’s Building 87 ? or “B87” as it’s commonly referred to on campus ? one of 125 buildings that has populated the Microsoft’s 500-acre Redmond, Washington campus. Despite its unassuming exterior (a concrete box exterior imagined as ‘Brutalist lite’), Building 87 is special, with a unique reputation amongst an ocean of other buildings dedicated to more pragmatic endeavors and purposes of operating one of the largest technology companies on earth. The building is observed as an oasis where “the cool stuff happens”.
Within B87 a team of designers led by Groene are given a high ceiling to explore ideas, design prototypes, and investigate properties of materials to a degree only an $825 billion dollar compan...
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