“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 attention to human scale and beauty that I haven’t seen in anyone before.” The first collaborative effort by the two well-respected practices, the new Google campus plan will replace the existing set of nondescript office buildings that span four sites. "You bring those two together.. and you just have this team that does pretty amazing stuff," exclaims Radcliffe.
Indeed: the video reveals ambitious, innovative renders. 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. Covered in transparent canopies, the structures will be climate-controlled but allow in natural light. Interwoven by a series of bike paths, landscaping, and cafes, the project aims "to blur the distinction between our buildings and nature." With a heavy rhetorical emphasis on the natural beauty of Silicon Valley, the release explicates their aim to be both energy-efficient as well as to "bring new life to the unique local environment, from enhancing burrowing owl habitats to widening creek beds."
Coming on the heels of ongoing projects at competing tech firms, in particular the Norman Foster's donut-shaped Apple campus and Frank Gehry's surprisingly verdant plans for Facebook, the BIG-Heatherwick designs offer a new vision for the future of Silicon Valley. At stake – if you believe the hyped-up rhetoric of the Google video (and I'm not sure I do) – is nothing less than the defining of the architectural typology of the Internet Age.*
For more information, check out the press release here.
*as determined by its major corporate players.
94 Comments
Nice botanical garden.
Boy oh boy is that going to need a shitload of HVAC. Maybe as much as a server farm.
biodome? where's Pauly Shore?
this makes no sense at all. why enclose huge those spaces at all? why not just design it like an outdoor mall with those common spaces open air.
so surround the office spaces/buildings with an envlosed greenhouse structure to raise the near perfect natural temparature of SF only to then lower that temperature with HVAC to mimic the near perfect natural temperature. Architecture! Makes sense. Am I reading this wrong?
I will pray for Hail
This is like every 50s-70s interior rendering.... also lol to the community/urban jargon.
I wonder what the moral of the biodome movie was.... Gonna have to watch it
I agree with Bjarke's comment at the beginning--which is a bit damning of Silicon Valley, but his proposal is a bit too anti-architecture. Oh it's a kit of parts, with a light glass skin. It's cleverness and marketing as a substitute for buildings...
Total Glenn Small ripoff
jk
Snipe snipe snipe. There're some good ideas here. For one, the city of Mountain View is considering approving residential zoning for 5000 around these buildings. They're loathe to approve a single grocery store or commercial space for the neighborhood, forcing residents to drive everywhere.
Google says, "okay fine. We'll build the commercial space on the ground floors of our HQ." This is a great postive position for the community, if it works out. This is the kind of thinking we might ask for from our corporate neighbors.
the video has 200,000+ views and Radcliffe says something like 'tech really hasn't found a language for buildings'...the precedent for this proposal is lengthy and it would be great to see BIG and Heatherwick Studio execute it.
Here are a few examples:
Buckminster Fuller was 50-100 years ahead of his time?
jla-x here is some Glenn Small
John Portman
etc....
It's Google Glass, the architecture version.
BIG really sold them on 1960s sci fi brutalism, and sniping aside I hope it gets built. But it could have used the expressionist quality of a Steven Holl. Looks exactly like so many plans from that era.
why not?!
Maybe their idea of sustainability is a bubble city where the survivors of a ruined planet can eke out a meager existence.
I'm for this. It will be an experiment and if anyone can afford to experiment with architecture at this scale it's Google.
I do see the possibility that this is a first step towards Logan's Run, of course.
That Frei Otto stadium is so glorious, I visited it 20 years ago and just, man. Loved it.
Imagine the embodied energy it takes to build this.
imagine the complexity and the cost to build this.
imagine the ongoing maintenance effort and cost it would take to keep all the little responsive sunshade thingies furling and unfurling, to keep the movable buildings moving around, just to keep the thing from overheating and to just keep the water out.
Despite the shiny happy optimism of Bjarke, this is the very antithesis of sustainability.
More starchitect bullshit. Just like politics: blatantly empty promises never intended to be implemented or used for anything other than PR.
Bjarke's hedonistic sustainability is some first rate bullshit, puts Schumacher to shame.
Would it would be better if we all embrace 3D printing technology and live in one of these:
The Future of 3D Printing Will Be Neoclassical Villas.
No.
Apple still looks like the adult here... Refined, well planned, to Google's kid friendly lightweight futurism that they don't really know how to pull off.
Bubble city? I used to work in Silicon Valley and occasionally still do. Great nice balmy weather in spring, summer and fall - winter is nice too - why put a bag over your buildings?
It will - if built - join the blimp and dirigible hangars at Moffet field as well as Shoreline amphitheater as symbols of mountain view - a big theme park for tech
Pretty cool, but anyone ever tried working on a laptop outside? I'm sure someone will figure it out.
Oh, I see. It's like a regular cluster of buildings with a 'skin' over it...
There was an elegance in form in Frei Otto's olympic park and Bucky's geodesic dome. I fail to see the same elegance in BIG+Heatherwick's proposal. I hope they can refine it... I like the idea of the experiment...and I think it has more flexibility than Apple's campus. The outdoor spaces seem better integrated with the building as they and the adjacent spaces are more readily programmed. Thank god for that.
Lightperson, I feel like Apple's campus can be read as "refined" when actually it's "simplistic". It feels too much, to me, like a second year student's project where they say "I'm going to do a donut building!" (or all hexagons, or a pyramid...)then they force everything into this one shape., whether it works or not. There's no flexibility in a circle plan.
Xenakis, I was wondering that too - the most beautiful climate int he country, of not world, and it's being experienced from under a dome? But again: I think t's a cool experiment, why not try it?
^ Because sustainability is a much more appropriate experiment.
justavisual I would suggest the elegence in form comes form how both Frei Otto and Bucky found for forms.
[ FREI OTTO : SOAP FILMS AND TENTS ]
FREI OTTO - MODELING WITH SOAP FILMS
which of course had everything to do with sustainability.
Yes, sustainability should be experimented with, because LEED ain't proving jack. I like this project because this company, Apple too, is proving to the other corporate hacks, that architects, experimentation and risk can bring a lot of value to their bottom line and the design profession.
The third image in the post bears a striking resemblance to this painting.
Donna
Sure - because that will lead to a better solution - something that we haven't seen yet - And I believe Google will provide a lot of input on that whatever unforseen design becomes .Mountain View is about experimentation - hence Google's association with Nasa/ Ames - am experimental Airbase for over 50 years. I like your read on the Apple ring - Apple is about simplistic refinement - they are a "Mature" Silicon Valley company. Google is still in the "anything is possible" mode. Time to be idealistic again.
exactly Olaf :)
I'm hoping the project is as fantastic and idealistic as the renderings but but but
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/style/why-google-glass-broke.html
There is a line where you need to be able to pull it off. There seems to be a lot of design convo (esp on blogs and museums) that never makes it to reality. Where is the mock up of this light glass material? And like glass, they haven't thought about the sociology of a transparent workplace. If you take away all of the futuristic pr hype that Google puts out, they have more in common with Yahoo than Apple--who have been shown to be the real innovators. Apple would have tested the material before creating unrealistic renderings.
Real sustainable architecture will never be delivered by the top-down market-conscious profit-centric corporate-financial complex simply because there is no profit in it. There is no financial profit in it because it is decentralized, local, humane, environmental, etc.
dogs, pigeons, children pointing, dads with dreads and cyclists staying in their lanes. all served up in the retro/futuristic domes of tralfamadore.
Apple has a much more controlled and restrained brand identity but I'm not convinced thats evidence of a type of innovation that is somehow more "real" than what google does. The two companies just deal with the media and public differently. They have different cultures and different identities.
I can imagine that the google campus will become more of a laboratory for testing a new wave of projects that are more spatial and material.
++Miles
Real sustainability is the antithesis of our current society. This entire structure is inherintly unsustainable. Thus far we have applied nothing more than diet pill sustainability- a feable self-dellisional attempt to sustain or give the illusion of sustaining an unsustainable lifestyle.
Jla-x, What do you picture when you think of real sustainability? Are we talking less globalization? Zero population growth?
Also, This bio-dome is indicative of several problems with architecture today.
1. "sustainability" is always approached with additive solutions. I really believe that this is mainly due to ego, the culture of architectural formalism, the celebrity culture within the profession (favoring fancy forms and personalities over boring stuff like science), and lastly a complete misunderstanding of basic sustainability.
2. Detachment from nature. We are still banking on technology over nature to save us all..It won't...Bucky was awesome for his time but his optimism is not appropriate for an era where an Albatross has more plastic in its stomachs than Paris Hilton has is her tits..... We need to work with ecology and technology in a symbiotic way...Technology alone is not enough. Nature will win.
3. The profession is failing to adapt to new challenges because it is too invested in this 20th century "professional" model of client ass kissing and boys clubs. We shit on anyone who wants to take the road less traveled by excluding them professionally and by punishing them with narrow barriers to entry. Also, we have separated ourselves (via ego/professional turf wars/standardization of entry into profession) from other allied professions like engineering and landscape.
The problems with our society at large make the above issues look like nothing. Even if we fixed all that internally, we would still be at the mercy of the greedy corporate client...
All this combined has stunted our ability to move our discipline forward scientifically (with regard to both soft and hard sciences) and has rendered our profession completely insignificant in the area of sustainability...We have all heard that architecture is half art half science. We basically choose the art half over the science half, and we don't even do art half of the time. I cant help but look to physics and envy the enormous acomplishments they have made...The LHC is a marvel of the world...and this BIG piece of shit building here is the scientific equivalent of throwing goats off a cliiff to study gravity...Our buildings should reflect our current knowledge of sustainable systems if they are trying to claim sustainability. If not, that's fine too, but if they are they should be cutting edge.
One last thing, some one at some point needs to NOT build something. Not building something will be revolutionary. Apple needs a new Headquarters? convince them to inhabit one of the many abandoned buildings littering our cities or to use the space they already have more wisely. Build Nothing! Hows that for a corporate identity.
holy shit welcome to utopia.
Jla-x, What do you picture when you think of real sustainability? Are we talking less globalization? Zero population growth?
Decentralization of all production and waste management, coupled with high-tech and low-tech ecologically symbiotic systems, housed within human scaled, poetic, serene, interesting, accessible, and well crafted environments, inhabited by people who care about our planet and each other.
"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden."
jla-x
Much of that seems very unlikely to occur. Ego isn't going away. Physical things are not going away any time soon. I suppose 3-D printing could decentralize some manufacturing.
I'm seeing a major rift in our profession between architects who have embraced the present and near future conditions (branding, globalization, aesthetics, materiality, technology etc) and those who work to resist it and criticize it from the outside.
I've noticed that my previous employers who worked primarily in high-end residential work were much more resistant to the mainstream culture of architecture and changes in technology and media generally. They barely had a functioning website. While my employers who had larger corporate clients were far more interested in design culture, new technologies, new practices and were much more adept at self promotion and crafting a compelling portfolio of work.
Its almost and insider vs outside divide.
It's the human condition, we've never been any different. What's changed is technology, which extends damage to global scale.
It's not that we can't fix things, it's that we won't.
We'll need to create energy, waste and manufacturing solutions that satisfy our wants without irreparably damaging the environment. We're not going to wind down civilization to save the planet.
"Its almost and insider vs outside divide."
Its a divide between our true potential as a species and our ability to realize it both internally and externally.
The only "inside" are the people with hoards of power and resources...The rest of us are all on the "outside" whether we believe it or not.
"We'll need to create energy, waste and manufacturing solutions that satisfy our wants without irreparably damaging the environment. We're not going to wind down civilization to save the planet."
Save the planet? Ha. In the words of George Carlin "The planet will shake us off as nothing more than a surface nuisance." This is about surviving the planet not saving it. "The planet will be fine, its us that's fucked."
The planet will wind us down.
I'm not sure if this can be parsed as a sign of the endtimes, it's only one particular company's vision of the future--though it is interesting because Google seems to view architecture as nothing more than a kit of parts with a thin membrane. I think there has always been a divide between building space and nature space--whether it is urban and park, or a suburban office space for a reason. It's a bold vision, but who wants to actually work INSIDE the park all of the time? It's just kind of a weird idea. I like glass roofs if they are a part of a architecture system, but as a total space there are fatal flaws.
We'll need to create energy, waste and manufacturing solutions that satisfy our wants
This is exactly the problem. How many of your wants must be satisfied? How many of them are real, and how many are just driven by marketing? Get on that treadmill and run like a hamster until you are dead. It's not for your benefit ...
Replace wants with needs - clean air, clean water, clean food, some basic health care and employ people productively in directly making their living, not trading their time for coin of the realm that must be exchanged for sustenance at the corporate outlet.
What struck me about this project was the almost zero understanding of the design issues by the architects. It was like they flew in over the weekend and had a charrette and left with these renderings.
The idea for the canopy comes from the Shoreline Amphitheater right next to the Google Campus. Conceptually they just took the tent from the Amphitheater and put it over an office park. Not well developed or thought out at all.
The architects have no clue on the climate in Mountain View. There is no need for a canopy, as it only rains about 11 days out of the year.
The big issue is that Google's campus is an office park with no public transportation. The only way to get to the site is by car, or by the private Google buses that come from San Francisco. Realistically there would be 50,000-100,000 parking spaces needed. No talk about how to deal with transportation...
No talk about housing. Where will the 100,000 Google employees live? Mountain View city council is talking about adding 5,000 new housing units next year. Not nearly enough.
To propose a futuristic scheme like this and not solve some basic architecture issues is completely irresponsible. These architects should know better.
The architect work for the client. The client should know better. If the architect had any balls they would demand that the client address these issues. Instead they just deposit the check.
Somebody should start a thread comparing starchitects to celebrities in other professions. There would probably be a lot of competition for P.T. Barnum.
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