Archinect - News

Clive Wilkinson says he regrets the role he played in the Googleplex's design

2022-01-24T17:35:00-05:00

For more than three decades, Clive Wilkinson has been among the most sought-after office designers in the world. He has planned spaces for the likes of Microsoft, Disney, Intuit and other companies seeking unorthodox approaches to work life. But he now has regrets about what is perhaps his most famous work: Googleplex, the tech giant's posh headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Wilkinson’s statements offer a rebuke to the Silicon Valley culture he played a role in pioneering and now deems to be "fundamentally unhealthy." The $1 billion office complex in Mountain View, California designed by STUDIOS Architecture with interiors by Wilkinson is serviced by a secretive $250 million transportation network and is famous for its plush employee perks that Wilkinson now says he regrets.

"This notion that you can provide everything that would support a worker's life on campus might appear to be extremely generous and supportive," he told NPR’s Bobby Allyn. "But it also has a whole range of potentially negative impacts. Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It's not real. It's not really engaging with the world in the way most people do. It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality."

Relisten to Archinect's 2016 podcast interview with Clive Wilkinson

Wilkinson also stated that he do...

BIG + Heatherwick Studio's Google Campus roof canopy unveiled

2019-09-11T21:00:00-04:00

Construction on the long-anticipated Google Charleston East HQ is making steady progress. The campus, designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio, will be partially accessible to the public and will include a series of pavilions, cafes, shops, as well as retail and plenty of landscaping for both employees and local residents to enjoy. A series of aerial photos of the construction progress have been released by the 111th Group.

The 111th Group has provided the finest in aerial photography for California's Bay Area and beyond since 1994. Specializing in commercial real estate photography, mapping, aerial surveys, GIS, construction progress photography and more, the 111th utilizes airplanes, helicopters and FAA approved drones to provide high quality photography and videography services. The 111th Group is located in the heart of the California's Silicon Valley.

Also, check out this drone video of construction progress from earlier this year:

New renderings of the Google campus revealed

2017-03-01T17:08:00-05:00

Silicon Valley is in the midst of something of a building boom with several of the tech giants commissioning new headquarters from big-name architects. First came Facebook with a campus designed by Frank Gehry. Next, Apple got Lord Norman Foster to design a spacecraft-like, donut-shaped building, which is currently nearing completion. And then there's Google, who had Heatherwick Studio team up with BIG to design a sprawling campus for megacorporation. After they encountered some trouble with the site, Google traded spaces with LinkedIn and are now inching closer to a groundbreaking.

Heatherwick Studio and BIG have recently released new renderings of the campus. Major elements include a sprawling tent-like roof that will enclose several discrete structures, regulating the internal climate. A green "loop" lined with cafes and shops will thread through several of these pavilion structures.

More images in the gallery below.

Google acquires LinkedIn's HQ in huge, unexpected property swap

2016-07-13T18:13:00-04:00

[Google and LinkedIn] announced a large, surprising property swap encompassing over three million square feet of existing and future real estate... From Google, LinkedIn is picking up seven buildings...In return, Google is getting LinkedIn’s Mountain View headquarters office and...four different surrounding properties that enable Google to follow through on its ambitious plan for a new, green, crazy-futurist campus.

Following an unsuccessful bid last year, this is good news for Google as they continue to push toward making their dream campus a reality. Unleash the “crabots”.

Previously on Archinect:

Googleplex expansion pivots BIG and Heatherwick design onto new site

2015-06-01T20:35:00-04:00

Google already had building rights for a fifth site overlooking Charleston Park, just east of the current Googleplex [...] A 2007 lease agreement allows Google to build up to 595,000 square feet of office and commercial space there. [...] The new plans feature the same futuristic designs by European architects Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick that were part of the larger plan debated by the city this year.

For some background on the Googleplex expansion plans:

Google loses to LinkedIn in Silicon Valley HQ pitch

2015-05-06T15:29:00-04:00

In a blow to Google’s expansion plans, on Tuesday the Mountain View City Council voted to give the search giant roughly a quarter of the office space it had requested for the project, and instead awarded the lion’s share of the city’s future office development –- 1.5 million square feet –- to LinkedIn. Google received about 500,000 square feet, or about enough to build one of the four buildings it had proposed.

How this news will affect BIG and Heatherwick's design for the Googleplex expansion is as of yet undetermined. Earlier today, we learned that Google planned on constructing its new HQ using "crabots", so clearly sights were set on the Mountain View City Council giving the go-ahead. David Radcliffe, Google's VP of real estate, said in an emailed statement: “We know the City Council had a tough decision to make last night and thank them and our community for more than six hours of debate,” and that Google would “continue to work with the City on Google’s future in Mountain View.”

Details on BIG and Heatherwick's proposal here.

New Googleplex will be built by robots

2015-05-06T13:02:00-04:00

Mock-ups of the so-called ‘crabots’ are featured in lengthy planning documents submitted to the City of Mountain View Council in Silicon Valley [...] ‘Our objective is to create a solution that can be assembled efficiently and economically within pre-erected canopy structures by means of small, easily manoeuvrable cranes.’ ‘Through the life of the buildings this [will] allow reconfiguration and maintenance…of the canopy envelope from within.’

The new Googleplex campus expansion, designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studios in collaboration to accommodate 20,000 new Mountain View employees, will be constructed by "an army of robot-crane hybrids", the Architect's Journal reports. Citing planning documents Google submitted to Mountain View Council earlier this week, AJ reports that these "crabots" would be "a mash-up of flexible crane and robotic machine".

The construction method fits squarely with Google's aim to keep their campus flexible and reconfigurable after it's built. As Nicholas Korody explained in our coverage introducing BIG and Heatherwick's design: "Eschewing immoveable concrete edifices, the campus would consist of a series of light-weight structures that can be moved around to accommodate new projects and product development as they unfold." Theoretically, these "crabots" could be the same employed to reconfigure the interior spaces as needed. Not sure whether they'd count among the 20,000, though.

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Critical response to Googleplex expansion focuses on suburban development, not architecture

2015-03-10T15:37:00-04:00

Google’s choice of BIG and Heatherwick Studios to design their Mountain View campus expansion is true to form: big, brash, debatably realistic, with a dash of techno-utopianism. The critical response to the proposal – a series of webbed glass shells covering reconfigurable utility spaces, integrated with the North Shore’s natural landscape and urban life – depended on where it was published. Design and architecture publications picked at BIG and Heatherwick’s design; tech and general publications focused on mega-client Google and the changes to Mountain View.

The renderings released at the end of February (see here) are part of a massive master plan submitted by Google to Mountain View officials on February 27. It is highly unlikely it will proceed as-is. But with the sheer real estate that Google commands in Mountain View, this project adding 2.5 million new square feet to Google’s cache of the majority of privately owned land in the North Bayshore area, it’s certainly not scaling ...

Google Unveils BIG + Heatherwick Studios Collaboration for New Campus Master Plan

2015-02-27T16:26:00-05:00

“Silicon Valley has been the cradle of a series of innovations that, over the last decades, have propelled technology and [the] world economy, but all of the resources, all of the intelligence, has been invested into the immaterial, the digital realm, the internet,” asserts Bjarke Ingels of BIG at the beginning of a new video released today by Google (posted at the end of this article). David Radcliffe, the Vice President of Real Estate and Workplace Services at Google, continues: "Tech really hasn’t adopted a particular language for buildings.” Google hopes to change that, unveiling an ambitious new master plan for their Mountain View campus designed collaboratively by Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studio.

Radcliffe explains that Google scoured the world for the architecture practices they found most innovative. "The BIG Studios – they’re ambitious, they do a lot of very community-focused projects and that was very compelling to us,” while Thomas Heatherwick "has this atten...