Since it was founded in 1998, Google has hardly been a pioneer in office architecture. But, last March, the company submitted a proposal to the city of Mountain View, California, that radically reimagines the concept of the suburban office park. The extraordinarily innovative 2.5 million-square-foot project, designed by a team led by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the Heatherwick Studio of London is composed of four immense, translucent tentlike buildings'a far cry from the many spec office buildings Google currently owns and occupies in Mountain View. Since 2004, its main headquarters, known as the Googleplex, has been in a corporate office park originally designed by STUDIOS Architecture (a member of the BIG/Heatherwick team) for Silicon Graphics and completed in 2000, then refitted by Clive Wilkinson.
Unfortunately, the city of Mountain View has only approved 500,000 square feet of the BIG/Heatherwick plans, one fifth of the proposal. While the architectural team continues to work on the design'perhaps to take it to another site, though no one is commenting'it's worth studying the original, to see how Google has come up with an entirely new idea for the office of the future. The hugely ambitious design breaks open the hermetic office park, dramatically lowers energy use, and invents demountable structural components that could vastly simplify future renovations or retrofitting.
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