Technology History | Microsoft Redmond — The Floor Plan Was the Argument

Microsoft bought its way out of an office block and into the trees in the winter of 1986. Wright Runstad took twenty-nine acres here in January 1985, construction started that August, and the company moved in on 26 February 1986 to a campus that had cost about twenty-five million dollars. Microsoft's own accounts disagree on how many buildings it was. The company history says buildings one through four; the company's own retrospective says six on a wooded thirty acres. Building 7 was skipped in the numbering, reportedly for permitting reasons. Everyone agrees on the shape. They were low, they were set among evergreens, and they were X-shaped in plan, which is a floor plan that generates a great deal of exterior wall. That was the point of them. Nearly every employee got a room with a door and a window, at a company whose product was written by people sitting still and thinking, and the plan was the argument made in concrete. Two weeks and three days later, on 13 March 1986, the shares went out at twenty-one dollars and closed the first day near twenty-eight, raising about sixty-one million. The company that did this had revenue of about $197.5 million in the fiscal year and 1,153 employees on the payroll. Windows had shipped four months earlier and was not yet the business; MS-DOS on other people's machines was. The campus grew to more than five hundred acres, and in 2015 Microsoft retained Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to replan the whole of it. The X-wings did not survive that plan. On 8 January 2019 one of the company's own software engineers took an excavator to the facade of Building 1, and the rest followed: twelve older buildings down, replaced by seventeen new ones of four and five storeys, though contemporaneous reports put the replacement count at eighteen. Building 4, which held Bill Gates's corner office, went with them. Lake Bill, the pond it looked onto, stayed. A footbridge over State Route 520 joining the east and west campuses opened in April 2024, planted along its length like a forest floor. The pin here is Building 92, the visitor centre and store, which is the part of the campus a member of the public can walk into. Photo: Runner1928, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, showing the campus in 2015, four years before the original buildings came down