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Google’s recently completed Bay View campus in Silicon Valley opened its doors to staff last week. Tom Lowe spoke with Heatherwick group leader Eliot Postma about how the concept developed.
The design challenge for any of the sites, Postma says, is an “extraordinary opportunity. “For an architect like Heatherwick, it turns out like Google to be a dream customer.
“They are thirsty to question, to experiment,” says Postma. Es quite intoxicating to be in this environment. It was an exciting time to work with a consumer with that point of ambition: asking what the office is and what the office can be.
This is more applicable now than at any other time in Google’s existence. Building Design’s interview with Postma, conducted on Zoom, was a reminder of how much assumptions about the overall culture of painting have replaced the covid-19 pandemic.
Companies around the world, which have rethought the work, will be attentive to what Google has done with its new headquarters.
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Many will be waiting for what the new offices will look like. Mention silicon Valley, where they are located, evokes photographs of turtleneck dresses sitting in ottomans in open spaces covered with artificial grass. That wasn’t the case, Postma says.
“There have been very few conversations about poufs and ping-pong tables,” he insists, when asked about the early conceptual stages of the project. Instead, the groups were asked to put aside all their assumptions about space.
“They had the opportunity to start from a blank sheet of paper and reimagine what the workspace might look like. “
It was about creating an area that would free the mind’s eye of those who paint there, Postma says, and “as temples of an organization’s values and culture. And I feel like a lot of painting areas around the world don’t aspire to that. “
Specifically, Google searched for giant buildings but also allowed small groups to locate places where they felt a “sense of ownership and belonging. “zone for a team of four.
The resulting concept, used for the 3 largest constructions on both sites, is a giant awning covering a two-story “village” of workspaces. The concept is that the “hull” of the construction is structurally independent of the interior, allowing Google to redesign the offices to meet the needs they may have in the future.
“When we started, we didn’t know what Google was going to be or what it would have to be in 10 years,” Postma says, adding that the purpose was “to design an area that was flexible enough to accommodate this update in an organization, and can necessarily create an area that you can simply follow. “
With the pandemic reaching the middle of the design phase of the project, this flexibility showed its price ahead of schedule. Heatherwick and BIG sat down with Google the first shutdown to talk about what jobs would look like after covid.
Postma says the team made a presentation with the message: “Don’t panic, we designed for that. “The concept of buildings that could “evolve as the office’s conversion desires and Google’s pressures evolve. “
So some adjustments were made to the interior, adding the balance between open and closed lanes and access: “nuts and bolts stuff,” Postma says.
Reconfigurations have also been made at Google’s large London office, recently structured in King’s Cross via Lendlease. Heatherwick and BIG were designated for the task after their work on upcoming concepts for the Bay Area campus.
So how did the partnership between the three companies come about?The story begins in 2014, when Google approached architects and designers in search of concepts for a new main work campus.
Until then, the company had inhabited and renovated many existing buildings, but had never built its own workplace from scratch. Some beginnings had been made in the afterlife with other architects, but “they hadn’t found the right solution,” Postma says.
Then, Larry Page, co-founder of Google and majority shareholder of its parent company, Alphabet, and lately the seventh richest user in the world, stepped in to search for designers. About 10 companies were invited to submit a 10-minute video describing their design. philosophy and how they would design an office task for a company like Google. After searching the past, Page and his team discovered that the Heatherwick and BIG grounds stood out and brought the two studios together.
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It was a “kind of marriage,” says Postma. The two teams, which at first consisted of about six people each, worked together on the master planning and thought about the principles of the project. “The agreement from the beginning was that if this was going to be a success, we had to be like a complete 50/50 design partnership,” Postma says.
“And that’s how we treated it from day one. “The groups organized a workshop template with Heatherwick staff sent on vacation to BIG’s New York office, and vice versa, and the two groups traveled together to the Mountain View site in California. .
It was on the first of those trips to Silicon Valley that the concept of the task began to take shape. Google took Postma, Heatherwick founder Thomas Heatherwick and the rest of the invited groups to a NASA airfield near the Bay View site. It is home to Hangar One, an aircraft hangar built in 1933 that is the third largest in the world.
Its cladding was removed for renovation, and sunlight passed through the “cathedral-shaped” structure, Postma says.
The groups maintained the concept of a hangar-like envelope “under which Google’s workspace and life can be defined, but from this type of environmental enclosure and can continue to evolve. “
Once the direction of the project was decided, the groups expanded, and eventually joined another 30 people for each practice running on the task. Parts of the site were divided into packages, with Heatherwick taking the canopy and backyard for a task and GRANDE taking care of the interior.
In some other project, BIG took over the deck and canopy and Heatherwick took care of the interior. All ongoing design issues were discussed and mutually agreed.
One of the main goals is to create buildings that are as sustainable as possible. The canopies are covered with solar panels, which supply 40% of each building’s energy. Shaped like dragon scales, they will be kept in good condition thanks to a series of walkways built on the deck that will allow access to butler staff.
The curved roof segments, described through Postma as “scallops,” are designed to drain rainwater to the next segment until it reaches a gutter surrounding the perimeter, where water is channeled into the corners of buildings. From there, it moves into underground garage tanks and moves on to a recycling formula that uses ponds on the grounds surrounding the campus to clean it.
The result is that the buildings are in the water, which is a feat in California, a state that suffers from chronic water shortages.
Water ingress is also reduced through a massive geothermal heat pump system, the largest in North America. This is the need for cooling towers, which use a large amount of water to cool the air circulating around the complex, which means that the water intake wanted to cool the buildings is reduced by about 90%.
The awning has also been designed to balance the trade-offs between softness and warmth to decrease energy consumption. In particular, the buildings lack the sky softeners, which would allow too much California sun to penetrate and increase the load on cooling systems. Instead, The “scallop” frames a large curved window that opens with enough light to minimize the amount of electric light needed without heating the building.
These windows have a symmetrical rotation, which means there is a view to the outside, wherever you are in the building. they are, being able to know if it’s day or night, synchronize with your circadian rhythms and feel hooked on the outdoor world. “
The degrees are also staggered, allowing for a line of sight to the windows and a “visual connection to the landscape beyond,” even if they were in the middle of the building, Postma explains.
This landscape is not necessarily as inspiring as you might expect. While a coastal wetland habitat lies north of the campus, the south is flanked by a giant parking lot, the east by a giant commercial hangar organization owned by NASA, and the west through a canal overlooking the buildings.
As they progress through campus, a member on their first stop in the office will begin to drive through what is necessarily a large commercial park. But the scene becomes more natural as you move onto the Bay View campus, Postma says, as the wetland appears.
These wetlands are a nesting floor for the western plains tecolote that, as the call suggests, digs burrows. In 2008, a pair of birds, billed as a kind of special fear in California, built their underground nests in a place where Google planned to build a hotel.
The Mountain View Council, which owns the land, evicted the owls and then purchased the land in the adjacent wetland for the birds to settle. Not much of the original Bay Area habitat remains, but at least the landscape that was built on the grounds of Google’s new headquarters can provide a much-needed home for owls.
So what’s next for Heatherwick? Now that the company has finished a major business project, can it be the next Foster?
“Of course,” says Postma. Si makes the physical world around us better for everyone. Our starting point is not scale or typology. It’s about the challenge and whether we can use our design and thinking skills to get other people to solve it.
The long-term direction of the study, he says, is “to continue humanizing the world around us, to continue to realize projects that will make towns and urban areas more human and, fundamentally, the more we can do that, the better. “
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