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With construction of competitor Apple’s new spaceship-like Campus 2 well underway, Google has announced its own plans for a revamp to its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
And while Apple’s project is of interest to construction professionals due to the sheer scale of the $5 billion project alone, Google’s is interesting in how it will require the construction of an office space unlike any other—one that is both adaptable and sustainable—to accomplish its lofty goals for the ideal campus.
As you can see in the gallery above, the dominant features of the updated campus are the addition of massive see-through canopies. Each of those canopies will be new offices for the company, allowing Google to expand from 20,000 workers to 30,000.
But Google wasn’t interested in building new offices that were simply larger or better looking. It wanted more functional office space that incorporated the beauty of Mountain View. Here’s the explanation of the new office’s from Google’s announcement blog post:
Instead of constructing immoveable concrete buildings, we’ll create lightweight block-like structures which can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas. (Our self-driving car team, for example, has very different needs when it comes to office space from our Search engineers.) Large translucent canopies will cover each site, controlling the climate inside yet letting in light and air. With trees, landscaping, cafes, and bike paths weaving through these structures, we aim to blur the distinction between our buildings and nature.
In other words, these new work spaces will function more like greenhouses or bio-domes than your regular office building. You can read more about the campus update in the gallery above and you can watch architects Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick discuss their vision for the campus in the video below.