The vision outlined in these documents, an application for a major expansion of the Googleplex, its campus, is mind-boggling. The proposed design, developed by the European architectural firms of Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studio, does away with doors. It abandons thousands of years of conventional thinking about walls. And stairs. And roofs. Google and its imaginative co-founder and chief executive, Larry Page, essentially want to take 60 acres of land adjacent to the headquarters near the San Francisco Bay, in an area called North Bayshore, and turn it into a titanic human terrarium.
The proposal’s most distinctive feature is an artificial sky: four enormous glass canopies, each stretched over a series of steel pillars of different heights. The glass skin is uneven, angling up and down like a jagged, see-through mountain. The canopies will allow the company to regulate its air and climate.
The plan is just as impressive from the outside. The canopies hug the ground like a biosphere on the surface of Mars, except in a few places where they dramatically curve upward. Google isn’t planning to seal off its new campus but will keep it open to acres of manicured parks and restored coastal wetlands,
Parking lots are underground and hidden from view. Employees will have access to exercise equipment and yoga studios on majestic balconies overlooking central courtyards, although the renderings curiously omit railings and other safety barriers. Perhaps gravity will be different under the glass as well? With cafes and stores on the ground floor, and 5,000 units of proposed housing within an easy recumbent bicycle ride, there may be no reason for workers to ever leave.
Silicon Valley is blessed with nearly idyllic year-round weather, but it’s almost devoid of landmarks, other than a mission-style bell tower on the campus of Stanford University and the utilitarian sign of a once famous electronics company, Ampex, standing along the 101 freeway in Redwood City. Generic low-rise buildings inside endless office parks are spread over the rest of the area, which is carved up by highways and dotted with parking lots, marring a landscape once rich with orchards. The leaders of high tech, it seems, were too busy changing our world to pay attention to theirs.
The Apple spaceship, scheduled to open next year, is meticulously conceived and obsessively polished down to the smallest detail, just like an Apple product. Forty-foot concave glass panes for the curved walls were specially manufactured in Germany. With a projected price tag of $5 billion, it will probably be the most expensive building in history. It will also be closed to the public.
Jobs’s presentation kicked off an architectural arms race in Silicon Valley. In 2012, Facebook commissioned Frank Gehry, mastermind of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, to expand its campus. Facebook’s building, which opened this year in Menlo Park, is more subdued. It recalls the “great workroom” of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters: a soaring space with 400,000 square feet of open offices, where desks can be organized and moved around as needed. The new digs function less like a headquarters and more like a living social network, where employees can hobnob freely and have unplanned exchanges of genius. A lush 9-acre green park covers the roof.
Foster is 79. Gehry is 86. Both are Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning eminences in the twilight of their careers. To design its own future home, Google has enlisted two young guns: 40-year-old Bjarke Ingels of Denmark and 45-year-old Thomas Heatherwick of England. “If you add my and Thomas’s ages together, we are just as old as either Frank or Norman,” Ingels says. “So the math adds up.”
Getting the city of Mountain View to approve the plans may be just as big a challenge. In a meeting on May 5, the city council snubbed Google and granted only a fraction of the land it requested. The company did its best to conceal its disappointment: “We’re pleased that the council has decided to advance our Landings site,” says David Radcliffe, Google’s vice president for real estate, referring to one of the North Bayshore locations. “Given the connected nature of our campus design, we will continue to work with the city to identify a process to move forward with this project.”¹
