Exclusive: Google campus plan would explode the concept of buildings, workspace (renderings)

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Google's vision for its new buildings in Mountain View is unlike anything built before it; Google describes the enclosures as "canopies," but from the air they also look a little like greenhouses (a high-tech shading system will block the sun). Architect Bjarke Ingels says the idea is to "dissolve the building into a simple, super-transparent, ultra light membrane." Thomas Heatherwick, who is also working on the project with Ingels, describes the approach as "a piece of glass fabric, and draping it across some tent poles." The image also shows hundreds of oak trees, new walking and bike paths, and open space throughout the North Bayshore, a 500-acre enclave on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. At foreground is a triangular finger of land where LinkedIn is also eyeing a major redevelopment — a project that could not happen if Google is granted all of its development request.

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Nathan Donato-Weinstein

Real Estate Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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When Google Inc.'s engineers need a certain kind of workspace, they come to David Radcliffe with a question.

"Dave, we've got this new idea, and I need this kind of space," Radcliffe, the company's global real estate chief, said in an exclusive interview this week.

See the renderings in the photo gallery

Problem is, current architecture is too rigid, and construction methods too slow, to provide it quickly. So Google — along with a team of prominent architects — has spent more than a year rethinking every assumption about office buildings, tech campuses, and how they relate to their neighborhoods. The result? Four futuristic structures where basic building elements — floors, ceilings and walls — attach or detach from permanent steel frames, forming whole new workspaces of different sizes. With help from small cranes and robots ("crabots"), interiors will transform in hours, rather than months.

Those structures, enveloped by draping glass canopies as big as city blocks, would sit amid a transformed North Bayshore district, today a largely forgettable suburban office park.

Google's vision, contained in a master plan submitted to Mountain View officials today, would see wide swaths of land returned to nature, crisscrossed by walking trails and dotted by plazas, community gardens and oak groves. New ground-floor retail, markets and cultural spaces would invite the public, and walking paths would run through at least one of the buildings — letting outsiders inside the Google hive.

"It really evolved out of stepping back from first principles and saying, 'What's holding us up?'" Radcliffe said. "It comes out of our experiences of trying to support our evolving business."

New plans revealed
Google provided the Silicon Valley Business Journal an exclusive advance look at its 225-page planning document, which lays out its hopes for everything from alternative energy generation (photovoltaics will be integrated into the glass canopies) to larger issues affecting the area (like combating sea level rise through major infrastructure improvements).

Louise Mozingo, chair of the landscape architecture and environmental planning and urban design department at U.C. Berkeley, called the proposal "utopian."

"They're absolutely trying to remake a whole district in a city," Mozingo, who studies tech campuses. "There's no other company that's ever tried to do this. That's a very ambitious vision."

The tremendous scale is possible only because Google, with $64.4 billion in liquid assets, has assembled the vast majority of privately owned land in North Bayshore, a 500-acre enclave north of Highway 101 on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. About 35 percent, or 19,000, of Google's 53,700 workers now work in what is affectionately called the Googleplex, the company said at a recent city council meeting.

As reported earlier this week, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels of Bjarke Ingels Group and Thomas Heatherwick of London-based Heatherwick Studio lead the design team. The landscape architect is San Francisco's CMG Landscape Architecture (which is also doing Facebook's Building 20, designed by Frank Gehry).

In stunning, vividly colorful aerial renderings, their buildings appear as faceted, transparent hemispheres, glowing in the night; on closer approach, the clear skin is tent-like, a glass and fabric membrane stretching from towering poles.

In an introduction to the master plan, Google acknowledges its approach is unfamiliar: "Above all, our plan is a commitment to inventing a new way of doing things — an attempt, in the Google spirit, to bring the future close to hand."

Audacity
The projects, which total 3.4 million square feet, would rise on four sites: The Landings, currently an 18-acre sprawling office park; a 7.5 acre parcel on Huff Avenue; a 22-acre block south of Charleston Road at Joaquin Road and 12.5 acres south of Charleston Road at Shoreline Boulevard. Google says it wants to start with the Landings first, aiming for completion by the first quarter of 2020. Huff would follow the same year, while the other two would follow in two-year intervals.

The projects, if approved by the city, would be Google's first ground-up construction project. Radcliffe acknowledges that Google is still figuring out the engineering for the new buildings and how they would work. (Google for years has had two approved development sites near the Googleplex, but has yet to start construction; those sites are not part of the new plans.

Still, it's not at all clear that the city will approve Google's plans as presented. The company is competing with other technology powers — most notably LinkedIn Corp. — for limited future development rights in Mountain View. To sweeten things, Google is proposing a package of public benefits it values at $200 million that would include things like a new public safety building and a bike bridge across Highway 101.

LinkedIn today will also propose expensive public benefits to secure a piece of Mountain View's future. Approving Google's plans as-is would stifle LinkedIn, a company the city views as an important element of its economic diversification, because Google would eat up essentially all of the currently allocated future development rights. And the request comes as Google faces renewed skepticism among some Mountain View residents who cite the negative impacts of growth such as traffic and rising housing prices.

Ultimately, the decision will be up to the city council. Ken Rosenberg, a Mountain View council member, declined to speculate on how the body would act. He is concerned about the city's job-to-housing ratio, and wants to see housing allowed in the area's wider development plan. (Google in its master plan has identified and set aside areas in its portfolio for new housing, should the city allow it.)

Still, he said he welcomed Google's experimentation, and the notoriety it would bring to the city.

"We have this vision of Mountain View becoming a world-class city, and that has to do with building standards that are different than a traditional suburb," Rosenberg said. "I think we need more than just the name of a company on a side of a building. The building itself should be a draw."

A new building system
Mountain View would not be the only Silicon Valley city to gain architectural distinction from a technology giant. With its new plans, Google is the latest in a parade of companies whose new buildings are challenging the image of tech firms as building-design also-rans.

Facebook Inc., which is finishing up a Frank Gehry-designed building in Menlo Park, is considering housing and retail in its next local expansion — a breakthrough for a Silicon Valley tech company. Apple Inc.'s Norman Foster-designed "spaceship" campus, an iconic structure fenced off from the public, is under construction in Cupertino. (Google, in a glancing dig in its planning package, notes: "Instead of turning inward like many of our peers, the new Google campus prioritizes transparency and inclusion.")

Outside the region, Amazon and its architecture firm unveiled an orb-shaped concept in Seattle, but on a much smaller scale (about 65,000 square feet).

Google's North Bayshore proposal is striking even among tech's other monuments, not only because of the size and scope of the effort, but also because the concept is a complete break from traditional expectations about workplace form and function.

Here is how it will work, grossly simplified: Inside the glass canopies, Google imagines stationary steel support columns upon which lightweight, modular building pieces can be inserted, removed, raised or lowered at will. Think of the floors sort of like oven racks; the walls between them can be added, or not. Crabots (which Google calls "a range of small flexible and manageable cranes and robotic machines") would lift and move these building segments around almost like furniture.

"We envision there will be some more permanent structures like stairwells and restroom cores and things like that," said Radcliffe, who is Google's vice president of real estate and workplace services. "Then we think there will be other components you can actually take out and put in."

The canopies themselves would generate electricity, while movable shades embedded in a second canopy layer control glare and keep the interior cool.

If it sounds futuristic, that's because it is. Much of the technology doesn't exist yet, Radcliffe said.

"This is new ground," he said. "We have some of the best engineers and minds in the world working on it."

One possible inspiration? The shipping-container industry, where huge containers are stacked and removed with giant gantry cranes inside large warehouses.

"At its simplest form, that's incredible flexibility," Radcliffe said. "Now what if you made that beautiful and transparent and lighter? You start to see, through other industries, glimpses of how all this might come together."

Reason to innovate
Yet after generations of building design and construction that arguably have served companies' needs, why would Google explode the very idea of the office building?

"I believe the concept really came from Larry," John Igoe, director of design and construction for Google in Northern California, said in the interview, referring to Larry Page, Google's co-founder and CEO. "Larry was very clear about the environment he wanted to create for workers, especially engineers — how they'll be able to interact with each other."

The notion of flexible workplaces isn't new. In the 1940s, Bell Labs in New Jersey developed the first movable wall, allowing a larger or smaller lab space, Mozingo said. In the 1960s, the cubicle arrived, which enabled companies to add or subtract workers quickly within a set floor space. It gave rise to a pejorative idiom: The cube farm.

More recently, tech companies have packed workers into open-plan offices. Google has long strived to foster innovation through collaboration, with an emphasis on encouraging people to interact and bump into each other spontaneously. The new concept, executives said, aims to take that goal further.

"In essence, you're getting rid of a lot of barriers to communication," Igoe said. "You don't have traditional walls. You have a view to see people across (the way) ... It's this whole idea of flexibility, adaptability, being able to expand when you need to, contract when you need to."

The latter is particularly crucial at Google, where business units can spring up overnight or grow slowly over the years — then shrink or pivot in a whole new direction. In some ways, the building designs parallel the company's efforts to bridge its business to a future where Google's core business, Web advertising, isn't as lucrative.

"Tech evolves overnight," Radcliffe said. "Teams come together, they disband, new products pop up; we can be a search company one day and be looking at self-driving cars the next, or both – and so we really needed facilities that were able to respond at the same speed as the technology industry was responding."

Mozingo, who chronicled the history of the corporate campus in her book, "Pastoral Capitalism," said the strategy represents a conscious break from campus edifices such as Apple's ring-shaped building, which has been hailed as distinctive but also derided for its questionable adaptability.

"They're obviously striving toward developing landmark architecture and design, and still maintaining the kind of flexibility that has been inherently part of the Silicon Valley culture for five decades," Mozingo said.

The a-ha moment
Google's design team selection is significant statement. Executives spent nearly a year scouring the world for the right architect; they ended up being unable to choose between Ingels, who recently unveiled the master plan of the 20-year, $2 billion redesign of the Smithsonian Institution south campus, and Heatherwick, who designed the 2012 Olympic Cauldron and the Garden Bridge, which will span the Thames in London. So Google invited them to join forces on the North Bayshore project.

"Both of them said the same thing — that we would love the opportunity to work together," Radcliffe said. "We brought them together and it's been pretty special." The concept wasn't obvious at first.

"There are as many iterations on the floor of the design room as there are days in the year," Radcliffe said. "We studied and studied. We looked at a number of different ideas and concepts. This started to make the most sense when applied against the wishes of the city and the precise plan."

It all crystallized one September day last year inside Google's real estate and workplace services headquarters, a nondescript building on North Shoreline Boulevard that would be scraped to make way for one of the new buildings.

"I think it was the fact we realized, structurally, it is something you can do," Igoe said. "I think that the individual components are fairly simple: A canopy, a structure, a foundation. What we're trying to do here is increase the level of modularization — and prefabrication — to the highest degree possible."

Justin Reginato, an associate professor in the construction management program at Sacramento State University, said the project would break new ground in the construction industry and generate excitement. But it could also be risky.

"The biggest challenge in any construction project is doing something for the first time," Reginato said. "I've never heard of an office space doing this. The skeptic in me says this is a very expensive way of solving these problems. But a company like Google is always on the leading edge of stuff, so the nonskeptic in me says if anyone can do it, it's going to be these guys."

Google's Radcliffe declined to provide the project's cost, but said it wouldn't be as expensive as it sounds.

"We're very optimistic that this will be not only an incredibly simple, elegant building, but something that can be reproduced at some economies of scale that make it very efficient," he said.

A new neighborhood
Outside of Google's enormous new structures — which would range from 330,000 square feet to 1.4 million square feet — Google is also proposing major changes to the North Bayshore, an ecologically sensitive area that was largely built out over the last five decades with low-rise office and R&D; buildings.

More than 30 acres would be reclaimed as open space, in the form of new wetlands, oak woodlands, burrowing owl habitat, parks and a "green loop" for walking and biking. A landscaped pedestrian and bike bridge would cross Highway 101 at Rengstorff Avenue.

Google would also widen creeks and embark on other infrastructure projects to prepare for rising sea levels.

Those and other projects are part of a suite of community benefits Google is proposing to win approvals of the development plan; others include education grants and a new science center in the North Bayshore.

"We're a part of this community," Radcliffe said. "We don't see it as anything more than investing in the community where we live."

Still, the project is likely to raise questions about just how big is too big. Google's projects would add about 2.5 million square feet of net-new additional office space in the area, enough for more than 12,000 new workers, assuming 200 square feet allocated per employee.

The real world
Traffic and housing — already friction points in the city — will likely spur public debate over the plan. Yet Google is proposing to build no additional parking spaces as part of the project, transferring all existing surface parking stalls to a discrete new structure snuggled up to Highway 101.

It says it's shooting to reduce drive-alone car trips to 36 percent, down from 46 percent today. That kind of transportation split (called "mode share" in transit argot) is virtually unknown in suburban context.

Those aspects of the plan partially address the negative externalities that have attended the spectacular growth of Silicon Valley's biggest companies. Google says its efforts, in concert with campus buildings that invite the public in, create mutual benefits.

"We heard from our employees what's important," Radcliffe said. "Fixing traffic was incredibly important to our employees."

The scope of Google's proposal — concentrated parking, solar-collecting canopies covering city blocks, and offices that confound the idea of fixed square footage — rival the "moonshot" ambitions the company has applied to artificial intelligence and robotics.

But there is cause for pause. It is lore in Silicon Valley corporate history that companies embarking on flashy building projects often run into trouble. Other projects are announced with fanfare, and never actually materialize.

"Human history is littered with people who tried to build really huge projects with unproven technology," Mozingo cautioned.

Yet few companies have had the kind of cash flow Google enjoys. And if the engineers deliver, the company may migrate its technological prowess beyond the digital realm.

"It makes sense Google in particular is trying to do this, because they're trying to reinvent urban transportation with Google cars," Mozingo added. "I think this is a signal that with their own buildings, they're trying to envision a new kind of city."

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Nathan Donato-Weinstein covers commercial real estate and transportation for the Silicon Valley Business Journal.