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.
“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:
