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...

Is it time to pivot away from open office design?

2021-04-30T14:23:00-04:00

Office design has changed over the years, but perhaps one of the most infamous design trends has been the open office layout. Pitched to foster collaboration and optimize space while bringing a new modern edge to the workplace environment, corporate offices across the globe were eager to adopt this design to their office. Since its emergence, the open office concept was synonymous with start-up headquarters, Silicon Valley tech offices, new corporate offices looking to adopt a trendy new work environment for their teams, and more. However, after years of championing open office design, the team at Clive Wilkinson Architects explains why "the open office is dead."

Amber Wernick, an associate at the firm, explained to Fast Company in mid-April that the number of possibilities for appropriate office designs in 2021 increased because of the pandemic. "Once they [the public] were forced to work from home and be away from the office, I think it opened a lot of peoples' minds to what the o...

Office Space: Clive Wilkinson on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #20

2016-04-25T15:55:00-04:00

Shortly after starting out in Frank Gehry's office in the early 1990s, Clive Wilkinson founded his own firm in Los Angeles, and has since designed far-reaching workspaces for such big-name clients as Google, the BBC, 20th Century Fox and Microsoft. I spoke with Clive about the evolution from cubicle farms to “serendipity machines” in office design, and his thoughts on co-working spaces. Also turns out he’s not a huge fan of Apple's "spaceship" campus.

Listen to One-to-One #20 with Clive Wilkinson:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
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RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://onetoone.libsyn.com/rss
Download: this episode

Projects mentioned in the episode:

↑ Clive Wilkinson's home at Norwich Drive

↑ Pallota Teamworks

↑ FIDM Annex

↑ "Super Desk" for The Barbarian Group

↑...