Adobe World Headquarters

The complex consists of three towers: West, East and Almaden. The 18-story, 78.9 m (259 ft) West Tower, first built in 1996, was the sixth tallest in the city of San Jose, and has 391,000 sq ft (36,300 m²) of office space. The 16-story, 71.9 m (236 ft) East Tower has 325,000 sq ft (30,200 m²) of office space, and was constructed next to the West Tower in 1998. In 2003, 17-story 72 m (236 ft) Almaden Tower was completed adding 273,000 sq ft (25,400 m²).[6] The buildings are situated atop of a 938,473-square-foot (87,187 m²) enclosed parking garage.[7] Both the West and East towers house Adobe's Research and Development and Sales and Marketing departments, while the Almaden tower houses administration and staff.

The buildings are known for their green design. The West tower is listed as an Energy Star Labeled Building by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.[8] In 2006, all three towers were awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification by the United State Green Building Council for environmental sustainability.[9]

Adobe's Almaden Tower is also notable for having the "San Jose Semaphore," an installation consisting of four rotating lights created in 2006 by artist Ben Rubin.[10] The lights rotate every 7.2 seconds according to a code; the pattern was deciphered in 2007 by Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo, who discovered the final message being Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.[11][12] The duo published a whitepaper chronicling their process of decoding.[13]

As of 2012, a new riddle was displayed;[14] the new code was deciphered in 2017 by high school teacher Jimmy Waters from Tennessee. He noticed that a particular sequence in the code might represent an audio silence. Running the full sequence through audio software and changing the pitch, he heard Neil Armstrong's One small step for man speech from the 1969 Apollo moon landing.[15]