Google’s plans for its North Bayshore headquarters in Mountain View, California were revealed at YouTube last week. The renderings look totally sci-fi, dynamic, and avant-garde. Bjarke Ingels (of BIG) and Thomas Heatherwick (of Heatherwick Studios) are collaborating on the project. And definitely it’ll be interesting to see what sort of mighty fusion they can come up with for one of the world’s most influential companies.
The expanded campus will be a drastic shift from Google’s traditional or even quirky corporate offices. This is something entirely brave and new. Most striking are the biodome-like see-through membranes enveloping the buildings, permitting light and air. Google says the buildings will be designed from scratch for the first time ever. The idea is to make them lightweight and movable, so they can be easily repositioned as new product areas demand new space. As Google’s own blog notes: Our self-driving car team, for example, has very different needs when it comes to office space from our Search engineers.
But more than just organic flexibility, the proposed HQ will be a lovely melding of building and nature. Nature, in fact, comes up plenty of times in the ten-minute video, where Ingels and Heatherwick, along with Google’s VP for Real Estate and Workplace Services David Radcliffe, describe how buildings should work with nature, making the best environment possible, and recreating the natural qualities that have been there in the first place. The renderings thus are populated by plants and trees, both outside and inside, thriving with the building, and not merely there as accents or pieces of furniture. In particular, the parking lots would be situated underground, instead competing for space aboveground. Here, the buildings give way to the natural landscape, protecting wildlife habitat such as burrowing owls, as well as widening creek bed to restore waterways.
Thomas Heatherwick says “It’s interesting to try and look at how you can really augment or turn the dial up more on that nature, at the same time as looking to protect the land use.”
And then there’s the community factor. Google, being a strong force in Mountain View, “can’t be a fortress that shuts away nature, that shuts away the neighbors.” So the goal is to dissolve the distinctions between office and neighborhood, and instead encourage vibrant and diverse urban communities. There’s plenty of walkways and bike lanes and retail shops where people can interact with each other. And again, the renderings—with their happy, bustling folks—show it.
This openness and accessibility is perhaps in direct contrast with Apple’s own HQ that value exclusivity and privacy.
As Lloyd Alter notes in Treehugger last year, “…[the] Apple headquarters ‘fit with Apple’s culture of secrecy, of designing closed systems, of making perfect objects unlike any in the world, all sealed up tight and inaccessible to anyone but Apple.’ I agree with Alexandra Lange who called it a throwback to ‘an inward-looking, hermetic, heterotopic corporate world.’ On the other hand, it is a singularly beautiful object.”
But back to Google. The planned buildings are indeed refreshingly elegant and avant-garde. As far as the values concerned—nature and urban communities—there’s really nothing new about it. Architects have been touting these two ideals for so long, integrating them in various forms of unions. But because it’s Google—and Google pervades our lives in so many meaningful and inevitably necessary ways more than anyone else—we’re all curious how its new redesigned campus will inspire urban communities from now on.
