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The return of Building 7

Pranksters lose one of their longtime inside jokes. The post The return of Building 7 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Apr 1, 2025 - 19:38

The new Microsoft Redmond campus occupies the space formerly held by several older buildings, including the original X-shaped Redmond campus buildings 1 through 11. The freed-up building numbers were reassigned to the new buildings, so we now have new buildings 1 through 15.

And that includes a new Building 7 at the corner of NE 36th St. and 156 Avenue NE.

Yes, this means that pranksters have lost one of their longtime inside jokes.

To honor the ghost of the original Building 7, a colleague of mine shared an article from the February 19, 1988 issue of the Micronews, Microsoft’s internal employee newsletter.

New Building Going Up
On the two-year anniversary of moving to Corporate Campus, it’s new building time again at Microsoft! Building 8, which will contain a whopping 115,000 square feet, gets underway in the next few days on the meadow land just north of corporate campus.
The new building will be the equivalent of two of the present corporate campus structures, but keeps the same floor plan. Building 8 should be completed by December.
While Building 7 is in the master plan to be constructed, city requirements mandate that the road improvements to Bel-Red Road must occur first – and the Bel-Red improvements are not on the City’s near-term construction plans. This is good news in that the grove of trees where Building 7 is planned can be preserved.
So why isn’t Building 8 renamed Building 7 if the original Building 7 isn’t being built now? “Building 7 is an established location on all the master plans approved by the city of Redmond and all the pertinent legal documents,” notes Buck Ferguson, Director of Administration. “Since the police and fire departments and emergency medical personnel use these master plans for their information, the city of Redmond designated the next building to be #8.”
With space on Corporate Campus in such short supply, Microsoft is expanding this spring to short-term quarters in the adjacent East Tech office complex. The Mailroom, Copy Center, and Training Rooms will all be moving to East Tech; CD ROM and Microsoft Press will also be occupying temporary space there. An asphalt path will be installed between Microsoft and East Tech for easier walking – and the move there will take place as soon as possible. Construction of the offices, restrooms, etc. in the shell space began last week and is planned to be completed in mid-April.

Bonus chatter: Wait, we freed up numbers 1 through 11, but the new buildings are numbered 1 through 15. What about building numbers 12 through 15?

Buildings 12 through 15 were the buildings referred to in the above article as the “East Tech office complex”. Those numbers were freed up in 2000 when the East Tech buildings were torn down to construct buildings 33 and 34.

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