Google Is Building A New Campus From Scratch
Google is building a new Googleplex customized with amenities that makes 35,000+ employees happy and working for Google more fun.
The current Google campus in Mountain View, California wasn’t built by Google. It is the former home of Silicon Graphics (SGI), the company that created the digital dinosaurs for the movie, Jurassic Park.
Google moved in and transformed boring office space into a tech worker’s paradise complete with cafés, workout facilities, lava lamps, dogs (cats are only allowed via YouTube), hair salons, swim-in-place swimming pools, game stations, laundry facilities, daycare, and doctors.
Vanity Fair was given an exclusive look at Google’s plans for a new campus Google is calling “Bay View.” Bay View will still be in Mountain View, but will be closer to San Francisco Bay. It’s being designed by the architectural firm NBBJ based in Seattle.
The project’s design was inspired by Google’s appreciation for data analysis. The company gathered information about how its employees work and which groups benefitted from being close to other groups. There will be nine buildings all shaped like boomerangs. The buildings will be connected by bridges, and the new headquarters will span 42 acres.
Vanity Fair spoke with Google civil engineer David Radcliffe about the new layout:
“The layout of bent rectangles, then, emerged out of the company’s insistence on a floor plan that would maximize what Radcliffe called ‘casual collisions of the work force.’ No employee in the 1.1-million-square-foot complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk from any other, according to Radcliffe. ‘You can’t schedule innovation,’ he said.”
The current Googleplex requires shuttles or bicycles to get from building to building, so it’s easy to see why Google would want to build it’s new campus from scratch.
