Starchitect Bjarke Ingels and London-based Heatherwick Studio have been tapped to design the new headquarters for Google in Mountain View, California. And get ready…because renderings of the massive project are already out.
“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 Silicon Valley Business Journal, which first reported the news, wrote. “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.”
The four structures will be scaled as entire city blocks and draped in glass canopies, according to the Architect’s Newspaper.
The campus would also reportedly “see wide swaths of land returned to nature, criss-crossed by walking trails and dotted by plazas, community gardens and oak groves.”
San Francisco-based CMG Landscape Architecture, which is currently working with Frank Gehry on the Facebook campus, is also on the project. [Architect’s Newspaper] – Christopher Cameron