South Lake Union · Seattle · 2023
Ground Floor
Studio.
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For one year in 2023, the ground floor of an Amazon building in South Lake Union, Seattle, became something unusual: an artist's working studio and fabrication workshop — open daily, embedded in the heart of a corporate campus, run by Seattle artist Joshua Borsman.
Ground Floor Studio was a pilot artist-in-residence program developed in partnership with Amazon's Global Real Estate and Facilities (GREF) team — a deliberate experiment in placing the creative practice of an artist, builder and maker alongside the engineers, designers and operators who shape Amazon's physical world.
The premise was simple, the execution was not. Take an empty ground-floor shell. Design and build a real fabrication studio. Open the doors. Make work — paintings, sculpture, machined parts, robotics, modular synthesis, digital art — in full view of the team that walks past every day. See what happens to the conversations, the projects, the atmosphere of a workplace when contemporary art is made in the next room.
What emerged was a working model: a maker space where Amazon engineers, product designers, facilities staff and visiting collaborators could step inside, watch a CNC mill carve aluminum, sit at a bench covered in patch cables, or just talk. A model for how a builder mindset and an innovative spirit can be cultivated in shared space — not in a conference room, but at a real workbench, in a real workshop, on the ground floor.
October 2022 — a raw concrete-floored ground-floor space, exposed ductwork, partial drywall. A room that wanted to be something.
Concrete floor. Exposed ceiling. Partial drywall partitions. Six skylights from the mezzanine above.
Architectural renders, floor plans, equipment placement. Two months of drawings before any tool was unboxed.
Walls, lighting, ventilation, electrical. The bones of a working space, made to hold heavy machinery and human conversation.
CNC mill, robotic arm, oak workbenches, modular synthesizers. Doors open daily, every weekday of 2023.
Before any tool was placed, the space was rendered, plotted, and pre-walked in software — every workbench, light, and machine in its eventual place.
From raw shell to ready-to-open. Drywall, lighting, ventilation. The slow accumulation of walls, wires, and the small infrastructural decisions a working studio demands.
A construction site that doubled as a design problem. Every conduit had to lead somewhere it was actually needed. Every light fixture calibrated to the workbench it was meant to illuminate.
Built in close coordination with Amazon GREF facilities staff — a dialogue between artist intention and operational reality.
A CNC vertical mill — eight thousand pounds of precision — delivered curbside on a South Lake Union sidewalk and forklifted through the front door, in full view of the street. The largest single object the studio would ever install, and a landmark moment in turning the empty shell into a real working facility.
The mill in place. Workbenches at their final positions. Pneumatics overhead, lighting calibrated, glass walls signed. Everything that was a drawing six months earlier, now standing in the room.
Open daily. The studio in operation — making, prototyping, demonstrating, gathering. A fabrication workshop in the heart of an office campus.
The CNC is running. A circuit board is half-soldered on a bench. Six people are talking about what they could build, and three of them are Amazon engineers who've never set foot in a fabrication shop before. That, exactly, was the point.Joshua Borsman · Artist in Residence · 2023
A seven-axis articulated arm that arrived in pieces, was assembled on the studio floor over the course of a week, and eventually took up permanent residence at the front window — usually holding flowers, sometimes holding a lamp, occasionally holding a tool. Waldorf was the studio's quiet third presence: not a tool exactly, not a sculpture exactly, but a little of both.
The CNC mill installed in Chapter Three earned its first job making the steel base plate that would anchor Waldorf's stand — a small, perfect closure between two arrivals.
Where the CNC mill insists on its industrial volume, Waldorf insists on something else: gesture. He could be programmed to repeat a precise motion a thousand times, but mostly he held a single object — a flower, a lamp, a small tool — and waited for someone to walk by the window and look up.
In two-thousand-twenty-three, with corporate offices on every floor above, Waldorf was the most quietly humane thing on the ground floor. A reminder that precision technology can also be tender.
↳ See Waldorf in motion in Films
Once the studio was open, it became part of the neighborhood — a glowing storefront on a sidewalk most people walked past on their way to work. Cars stopped. Conversations started at the glass.
The Elephant Super Car Wash sign — a Seattle landmark since 1956 — sat across the plaza, blinking its hot pink loop into the windows of every building around it. Inside the studio, a hand-painted homage to that same sign glowed back. The painting on the wall and the neon across the street were always quietly answering each other.
That was the whole proposition of Ground Floor Studio: place creative practice where it can speak to the city around it, not in a back room with the lights off, but here — at street level, glass to glass.
Four short pieces — the studio in motion. Waldorf at the lamp, Waldorf with the orchids, the mill cutting his base plate, and a long quiet afternoon.
Ground Floor Studio existed because a small group of people inside Amazon decided creativity was worth taking a real-world risk for.
Vice President · Global Real Estate & Facilities · Amazon
For sponsorship, trust, and willingness to take risks for creativity — the kind of leadership that turns an empty floor into a working studio, and a workplace into a place where things actually get made.
Global Real Estate & Facilities — the operators, designers, and project managers who turned a pilot idea into a built reality.
Every image from the year. Click any photograph to view full size; use the filters to navigate by chapter.