Having put their plans for a 1.1 million square foot Bayview Campus designed by NBBJ on hold back in 2013, Google is reportedly preparing to submit plans for a new campus, “a series of canopylike buildings” designed by Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), to the city of Mountain View this week.
Hampered by an amendment to the City’s General Plan, Google’s new campus proposal isn’t expected to include any housing. But Mountain View’s newly elected City Council is decidedly more development friendly and has been positioning to overturn the previous Council’s policy, which blocked the development of up to 1,100 units of housing in North Bayshore.
And in fact, recently elected Councilman, Leonard Siegel, “wants to amend the city’s plan to allow at least 5,000 new housing units,” according to the New York Times.
Rumor has it that Goog won’t immediately redevelop their recently purchased property at 237 and Middlefield. Previously there were plans to build a set of 5-6 story buildings. Now it appears that the existing two story buildings will be remodeled instead.
To be clear, this new proposal is in a different location than the previous plan – right in the middle of their current campus, on Huff. It isn’t a new design for the same location they put on hold in 2013.
For one of the richest corporations on the planet, this looks really dull and artless to me.
Its merits are in the environmental details: the rooftop gardens and the integration with the marshlands. This site will motivate one large corporation to combat global warming. It’s just a few feet above sea level.
Actually the ground floor of each building will host only data centers, no offices. The bet is that as sea levels rise, they will save on cooling.
Fighting global warming by building a huge office in a place it’s only possible to drive to. LOL
Oooh, you’re funny.
I cycled to work daily in the ancient times when I lived on North Whisman in Mountain View. Even from SF I’ve gone down on two wheels on Bike To Work Day. Some SFers do it weekly. (You can use your favorite search engine to learn about the SF2G group.) I know another coworker, shortsighted to the point of being denied a driver’s license, who’d cycle in from Santa Cruz three days a week.
The connector shuttle from Caltrain works well for the less fit.
I’ll not go on about Mountain View’s unwillingness to permit new housing to be built on that side of 101, as hope springs eternal the city council will change its mind. (Not that I’ll be moving.)
I am curious, how long does it take this coworker to cycle from Santa Cruz to Google? Or are they putting their bike on a shuttle? You are talking about some pretty big elevation changes to get from Santa Cruz over to the South Bay.
4 1/2 – 5 hours for an average biker. Faster for the very athletic.
So if they are cycling 5 hours each way to work and home, how much time do they actually have to work? Although some claim on this site that “cars are a thing of the past”, I find cars a logical way to travel the vast sprawl of the Bay Area, and I can travel 6 times as fast from Santa Cruz to the Valley as a bike. I am a proud Tesla owner, and am not convinced my Tesla is a “thing of the past”.
I wouldn’t use this extremely long bike commute to justify needing a car. As kbbl said “The connector shuttle from Caltrain works well for the less fit.”
Schlub: “this looks really dull and artless to me”: exactly, that is why they canned that scheme by NBBJ, and as the story mentions, recently hired startchitect wunderkinds, BIG and Heatherwick…(this being Google’s fourth round of hiring architects to design them a new HQ, first SHoP, then Ingenhoven, then NBBJ, now the new guys)
What about Hunter’s Point and the dump in Brisbane? Wouldn’t those be a better location?
Hunter’s Point need better transit options to be a job center. SF supes can require Google to provide enough employee shuttles or contribute to transit buildout.
UPDATE: Google’s BIG Plans For A Canopied High-Tech Campus.