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.
— bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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.
11 Comments
Maybe they should use the smaller space to actually test the ideas they proposed....
Overall, it seems like what looks ambitious and futuristic can also read as hubris and bullying, especially when it's Google and BIG. What looks conservative in the other proposal becomes "modesty."
"RELEASE THE CRABOTS!"
Consider the bubble bursted....
Smaller kill zone for the burrow owls?
That's a shame. I'm sure LinkedIn's HQ will be like their product...boring, corporate, and barely functional.
Nice one, Evan. I'm honestly a little nervous.
Maybe it's a good thing...Hopefully, they will try to integrate their HQ buildings into the fabric of a walkable community rather than an isolated compound.
What I wonder is if all the media attention to things that will never happen is inspirational or merely diversionary amusement.
And if this will be good or bad for BIG....
The whole idea of a corporate campus just seems horribly outdated. Whatever waterslides or ball pits they include in the design, it's never going to feel integrated with the city if it's an isolated enclave --- and the site itself was surely designed as such, since i doubt NASA had any ambition to 'bring the city in' --- so any marketing copy about integration seems disingenuous. Having at least one other company on campus should help the area perform better as a kind of office-park urbanism, at least (Silcon Valley office parks being, naturally, the clear precedent for both BIG+Heatherwick's and NBBJ's designs).
It's somewhat easier to recommend the Amazon model: despite the generic blocks going up in Seattle's South Lake Union, at least there have been some infrastructure improvements, and a few legitimately-active urban spaces, and an attempt at mixed-use urban density....
Yes, the project was based on a faulty concept ..... that nature = workplace.
It's more fun to move between outside and inside throughout the day. Even cavemen did their best work indoors....
back to Moffett Field - Maybe they can convert Hangar 1
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