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When is a tape more than a tape?
When Google opens the first fundamental project, it develops through itself, and it does so as it navigates backwards and seeks to perceive the future of the office.
That was the backdrop when Google representatives unveiled its 1. 1 million-square-foot, 42-acre Bay View campus next to NASA’s Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View. people and 240 sets of short-term accommodation for staff, similar to on-site hotel rooms, spread over four structures, according to Google. The sets provide out-of-town staff with transitional accommodation on the property.
The sum total reflects Mountain View-based Google’s vision for the long-term jobs, and the workplace, as it tries to meet the needs of in-person contact employees while giving them some of the privacy many have become accustomed to as they run away from home.
Bay View officially opened its doors to workers on May 16, more than a month after Google ended its voluntary style of working from home at its Bay Area locations and several others in the United States. The company expects the most workers to come to the workplace. 3 days a week, according to an internal memo known through CNBC in March. They will have to be fully vaccinated or have an approved home before they can return, and those who have won their first round of vaccinations will not want to comply. with its masking or testing requirements.
During a Google-run tour for members of the media on May 16, Bay View was virtually emptied an hour before noon, but filled up more during the next hour.
“It will probably be the quietest construction from that day on,” Michelle Kaufmann, Google’s director of real estate, said on a field trip to one of the resort’s offices.
Newcomers will see a number of meeting spaces on the first floor and workstations and convention rooms on the upper level. The idea, according to Kaufmann, is to break with typical open and closed office designs through design that “sits in the middle. “”
“So instead of having the classic office, which was made up of constant offices and closed meeting rooms, kind of a length that suits everyone, this new office is about having a much wider diversity of space types,” Kaufmann said.
The time point of Bay View workplace structures is divided into so-called “neighborhoods” separated through about 30 atriums. Neighborhoods are connected through gently sloping ramps, with atriums meant to provide some separation to give the team a designated domain they can customize to fit their needs, according to David Radcliffe, Google’s vice president of real estate.
Google expects 4,000 employees to fill the Bay View campus. The company announced the task in 2017 after spending two and a half years designing it with architects Bjarke Ingels Group, founded in Denmark, and London-based Heatherwick Studio. It did not disclose its full cost.
The complex also evolved with the goal of being the first giant company to run on carbon-free energy 24/7 until 2030. Bay View is fully electric and uses 100% air for its ventilation system, compared to 20 or 30%. used in a traditional system, Radcliffe wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
The amount of area Google provides to employees reflects a downward trend over the past two decades, but it’s also well above recent averages. That’s more consistent than the U. S. average. UU. de 196 square feet per employee in 2020, but still less than the average of 325 square feet employees had at the beginning of the 21st century, according to JLL data.
The pandemic has prompted Google to make some minor tweaks to Bay View’s design, one of which is to load more video conferencing devices into its offices to make it less difficult for staff to collaborate on and off-site, Kaufmann and Radcliffe said.
“We started in the long term of the workplace when we introduced those assignments,” Kaufmann said on the tour, referring to Bay View and Google’s Charleston East workplace structure about five miles away. The allocation of 595,000 square feet is in the final structure. Phase and is expected to be completed next year, according to Radcliffe’s blog.
“The pandemic has brought the long term closer to now,” Kaufmann said. “The things that we thought would happen in five or ten years are now falling,” he said.
While there was no specific architectural taste that influenced bay View’s design, Google encouraged through the 3 aircraft hangars at the nearby Moffett Federal Airfield, one of which is being restored for complex generation research, and the historic “Spruce Goose” aircraft. Hangar in Los Angeles, which are now offices for her and the company’s YouTube division, Kaufmann said. He also looked into the afterlife to locate which buildings lasted and were enjoyed for centuries, and discovered common elements among them: double-height spaces, high ceilings. , a clear design and the option for herbal light to cover the entire interior, he said.
“We sought to make sure everyone had an outdoor view and natural light, so everyone had an office feel in the corner,” Kaufmann said.
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