Google Re-Envisions the Workplace at its New Bay View Campus

Imagine enormous dome tents with swooping roof swags, skinned in dragon scales. That’s the look of two office buildings (plus a smaller events structure) by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Heatherwick Studio (HS) for Google’s new Bay View campus. Set in Mountain View, California, and eight years in the making, the compound will house Google Ads, with 4,000 employees at this location. As the Silicon Valley giant’s first purpose-built facility, Bay View provided an opportunity to “rethink the very idea of what office buildings could be,” recalls Michelle Kaufmann, Google’s director of real estate and workplace services, research, and development. “We [realized] we have no idea how we’ll be working in 20 years, 10, or even five.” So, seeking an extremely flexible design that could evolve over time, the company assembled a collaborative team—architects, engineers, builders, and others—willing, as she put it, “to try even things that sounded crazy.”

Equally unconventional, BIG and HS were paired by Google in a fifty-fifty design collaboration after it hired them to compete against one another in an initial exercise. The immersive R+D process that ensued, engaging thinkers from inside and outside Google, explored multiple strategies with full-scale mock-ups. “It wasn’t checkbook carte blanche,” says HS design director Thomas Heatherwick, “but, with no fixed assumptions, we were given time and space to push ideas to their absolute limit.”