An entertaining little bit of trivia about Microsoft’s building numbering schemes over on Scott Guthrie’s blog produced this amusing bit of MS trivia:
[Building 42] is also a little unique in that it straddles the line between the cities of Redmond and Bellevue. This was apparently something of a challenge when getting planning permission — since Redmond had a town ordinance that prevented buildings from being more than three stories tall, while Bellevue allowed an unrestricted number of building floors to be built.
Microsoft wanted the new Building 42 to be a nice four stories tall — but despite the fact that 2/3rds of it would have lived in Bellevue, the planning permission folks in Redmond apparently insisted that it not be more than three. After a lot of wrangling, they finally reached a compromise whereby the 1/3rd of the building that lived in Redmond was built to be 3 stories tall — and the 2/3rds of the building which lived in Bellevue was built to the full 4 stories in height.
If you are ever driving past campus on 156^th^ Avenue, you can spot the exact Redmond/Bellevue city border by seeing where an otherwise normal, professional looking building suddenly changes height.
This isn’t my building — MSCopy, the Xerox printshop for Microsoft, is over in Building 123 — I just thought it was interesting.