Google Unveils Master Plan for Silicon Valley HQ

By Anna Fixsen

Image courtesy Google

Today, Google unveiled plans for a ground-breaking, 3.4 million-square-foot campus conceived by architecture firms BIG and Heatherwick Studio, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reports.

SLIDE SHOW

Image courtesy Google

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“Tech really hasn’t adopted a particular language for buildings,” said David Radcliffe, Google’s vice-president of real estate development in a video proposal. “I mean, we’ve just found old buildings, and we’ve moved into them, and made do best we could.”

Envisioned as both a neighborhood and as a wildlife habitat, the proposed master plan on the fringes of Mountain View, California, features four clusters of buildings draped in a thin, glass membrane. These buildings, rather than being made from concrete, will be built from lightweight materials in order to be quickly reconfigured to keep pace with Google’s ever-expanding forays into fields such as automotive technology and biotechnology. Radcliffe compared the design to Lincoln Logs.

Radcliffe cited the community-focused projects of BIG, and Heatherwick’s attention to “human scale and beauty,” as reasons why they are Google’s top choice for the design.

“We have set out to imagine the work environments of future Googlers to be as adaptable, flexible and intelligent as the rest of Google's wide spanning portfolio – rather than an insular corporate headquarter,” said Bjarke Ingels, BIG’s founding principal, in a statement.

The master plan joins a growing list of forthcoming glitzy tech campus designs, including Frank Gehry’s Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, and Norman Foster’s doughnut-shaped headquarters for Apple in Cupertino.

According to Google’s official blog, the master plan will include everything from bike paths and an indoor running track, to an enhanced habitat for burrowing owls.

Watch the video proposal below:

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ethananthony wrote:

Reminds me of early attempts at solar and passive solar that erroneously tried to expand technical aspects of design into formal responses. Not to mention the error of using change as an excuse for paucity of idea. Nothing ground breaking here, unless one means in the literal sense...

3/1/2015 3:45 AM CST

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dranns wrote:

Agreeing with the comments by tsp1644 my question is how is the environment in side the bubble controlled? It would take a huge HVAC system to control this volume of space. I understand there would be as much green power as possible used in the project. Would it be energy neutral?

2/28/2015 8:37 AM CST

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tsp1644 wrote:

Not sure I get it. Seems hugely ironic. In that exceptional natural environment (despite the blight of some of what's been built in and around it already), the idea of giant moth-like shrouds draped over kit-of-parts structures, separating the people beneath the shrouds from the natural light, air, breezes and occasional rain of authentic nature,-- looks like a stunning contradiction. And camouflage for something essentially banal. Big hovering one-liners. Maybe if a bunch of topiary were added beneath the shrouds to further add to the ironic unnaturalness of it all, it would start to acquire a kind of offbeat conceptual coherence that would make it interesting.

2/27/2015 11:56 PM CST

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