The California government has approved Google's Mountain View campus project, which BIG and Heatherwick Studio have been working on for over two years. Construction will begin in the next few weeks and should be completed in 2019.
Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick designed a new type of headquarters for Google. It is designed not only for the company's employees: the complex will receive public spaces - a plaza and a park - and open access areas in the building itself.
On the ground floor, in addition to offices and laboratories, there will be auditoriums and lecture halls, shops and cafes. The improvement involves the planting of over 400 trees and the creation of many walking trails, and one of them - the “green loop” open to the public - will pass through the lower level of the building, uniting retail establishments.
The building will be two-storey, its area will be approximately 55,300 m2… Only wood, metal and glass are used in the decoration of the facades.
The main volume is rectangular in plan, but the curved roof eaves extend beyond the load-bearing structures, creating space for the pavilions.
The roof will be made of a metal alloy with a special coating that is said to be able to scare away birds. A significant part of the roof will be occupied by glazing with open structures, which will provide maximum natural light. The office will be equipped with a 4 megawatt solar panel system.
The building will not only be energy efficient: the roof is designed to collect rainwater for future use.
A large parking lot on campus was abandoned for fundamental reasons: they plan to transfer employees to bicycles and self-driving cars, which are being developed by Google.
The initial large-scale campus project, which BIG and Heatherwick Studio announced in 2015, had to be redesigned after Google was able to obtain the proposed building area. Also, in the current version, there is no mention of the innovative "craibots", which were mentioned earlier. Hargreaves Associates is responsible for landscaping.
