Social media giant Facebook has expanded its presence in Menlo Park, California. Designed by Frank Gehry and built in less than 18 months, the company’s newest building MPK 21 is a 524,000-square-foot sustainable office space that features a 3.6-acre rooftop garden with over 200 trees and a half-mile-long pathway. Facebook leadership wanted the new building, which sits on a formerly unoccupied industrial site, to have a limited impact on the surrounding environment. To that end, they worked with Gehry’s firm and general contractor Level 10 Construction to install a water reclamation system, approximately 175,000 square feet of fritted windows to protect the area’s birds, and a 1.4-megawatt photovoltaic array.
Inside the building, a single pathway runs from one end of the open workspace to the other. Along the path are five dining areas; 15 art installations, commissioned through the company’s Artist in Residence Program; and a 2,000-person event and meeting space. The office’s most distinctive features, however, are perhaps the “Town Square”—a covered atrium open to the outdoors that isfilled with redwood trees—and the “Bowl”—an amphitheater-style courtyard that links the MPK 21 to another Gehry-designed project: the much smaller MPK 20.
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