A temple to post-covid working culture: designing Google’s global headquarters

“Excitement” was the overriding feeling when taking on the job to design Google’s first purpose-built headquarters in Mountain View, California. Heatherwick architect Eliot Postma, the studio’s lead on the project, could be forgiven for having felt some pressure, too.

The newly completed office complex, designed by a partnership between Heatherwick and BIG, is no normal commercial scheme. Google is arguably the planet’s most important company and its ideas, both corporate and philosophical, influence businesses, governments and people across the world.

Designing its head office is effectively making a statement about what the future of work will look like.

Opened last week, the 42-acre Bay View campus includes two cavernous office buildings, a 1,000-person event centre, short-term accommodation for 240 staff and 20 acres of open space. A second site about 500m away, Charleston East, includes an even larger Heatherwick and BIG-designed office building which is still under construction.

波斯特马说，这两个网站的设计挑战是一个“非凡的机会”。对于像Heatherwick这样的建筑师来说，谷歌似乎是一个理想的客户。

“They’re craving to question, to experiment,” Postma says. “It’s pretty intoxicating, being around that environment. It was just a really exciting period to get to work with a client with that level of ambition – to really question what workplace is and what workplace could be.”

That feels more relevant now than maybe at any other time in Google’s existence. Building Design’s interview with Postma, held over Zoom, was a reminder of how much the assumptions of normal working culture have changed during the covid-19 pandemic.

Businesses across the world, which have been rethinking how they work, will pay attention to what Google has done with its new headquarters.

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许多人将对新办公室的样子有所期待。提起它们所在的硅谷，就会让人联想到穿着高领毛衣的员工坐在铺着人造草皮的开放式空间里的豆袋上。波斯特马说，这不是简报的内容。

“There were very few conversations about beanbags and table-tennis tables,” he insists, when asked about the project’s early conceptual stages. Instead, the teams were told to park all of their assumptions about office space.

“There was the opportunity with them to really start from a blank sheet of paper, and reimagine what workspace could be.”

It was about creating a space which would unlock the imaginations of those working within, Postma says, and become “like temples to an organisation’s values and culture. And it feels like an awful lot of workspaces around the world don’t aspire to that”.

更具体地说，谷歌想要的建筑是巨大的，但同时也能让小团队找到让他们感到“所有权和归属感”的地方。Postma表示，设计的挑战是“在一栋建筑中连接3000人，但也要为四人团队创造合适的空间”。

The resulting concept, used for the three largest buildings across the two sites, is a giant overarching canopy covering a two-storey “village” of workspaces. The idea is that the “shell” of the building is structurally independent from the interior, allowing Google to rejig the offices to fit whatever requirements they might have in future.

“When we started, we really didn’t know what Google were going to be or need to be in 10 years’ time,” Postma says, adding that the aim was to “design a space that was flexible enough to accommodate that change of an organisation, and essentially could create space that could keep up”.

With the pandemic striking halfway through the scheme’s construction phase, that flexibility showed its worth sooner than expected. Heatherwick and BIG sat down with Google during the first lockdown to discuss what working would look like after covid.

Postma says the team gave a presentation with the message: “don’t panic, we’ve designed for this”. The idea of the buildings was that they would be able to ”evolve as the changing workplace needs and pressures of Google evolve”.

因此，对内部进行了一些修改，包括在开放和封闭空间和入口通道之间取得平衡——“螺母和螺栓之类的东西”，波斯特马说。

重新配置也在谷歌的巨大的伦敦办公室，这是目前正在建设的国王十字由Lendlease。Heatherwick和BIG被任命为该项目的负责人，他们的工作是为湾区校园设计概念。

So how did the partnership between the three firms come about? The story starts in 2014, when Google approached architects and designers looking for ideas for a major new office campus.

到那时为止，该公司已经居住和翻新了许多现有的建筑，但从未从零开始建立自己的办公室。波斯特马说，过去不同的建筑师已经开始了一些项目，但他们“没有找到正确的解决方案”。

So Larry Page, the co-founder of Google and controlling shareholder of its parent company, Alphabet - and currently the seventh wealthiest person in the world - stepped in to look for designers. Around 10 practices were asked to submit a 10-minute video outlining their design philosophy and how they would approach an office project for a company like Google. After watching these back, Page and his team found that Heatherwick and BIG’s pitches stood out and decided to throw the two studios together.

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波斯特玛说，这是“某种意义上的婚姻”。这两个团队最初各有6人左右，他们一起进行总体规划和“大局观”，思考方案的原则。波斯特马说:“我们从一开始就达成了协议，如果要取得成功，我们需要像一个完全的50/50的设计合作伙伴关系。”

“所以这就是我们从第一天开始运作的方式。”Heatherwick团队的工作人员被派往BIG的纽约办公室，反之亦然，有时两个团队一起前往加州的山景城。

It was on the first of these trips to Silicon Valley that the concept for the project first started to take shape. Google took Postma, Heatherwick founder Thomas Heatherwick and the rest of the visiting teams to a NASA airfield which neighbours the Bay View site. On it is Hangar One, an airship hangar built in 1933 which is the third-largest in the world.

Its cladding had been removed for a refurbishment, and sunlight was pouring through the “cathedral-like” structure, Postma says. “We were kind of standing there looking at one another and saying, this is kind of what Google needs.”

团队确定了一个类似机库的外壳的想法，“在这个外壳下，工作空间和谷歌的寿命可以被定义，但与这种环境外壳分离，并可以继续发展”。

一旦确定了前进的方向，团队就会扩展，最终达到大约30人参与项目的每个实践。基地的部分区域被分割成多个部分，Heatherwick负责天棚，建筑场地负责一个项目，BIG负责内部。

On another project, BIG took the site and canopy and Heatherwick did the interior. Any ongoing design issues were mutually discussed and agreed.

One key objective was to create buildings that were as sustainable as possible. The canopies are covered in solar panels, which supply 40% of each building’s energy. Shaped like dragon scales, they will be kept in working order via a series of walkways built onto the roof which allow access to maintenance staff.

The curved roof sections, described by Postma as “scallops”, are designed to drain rainwater down to the next section until it reaches a gutter which surrounds the perimeter, where the water is funnelled into the buildings’ corners. From here, it gets moved into underground storage tanks and goes into a recycling system which uses ponds in the grounds surrounding the campus to filter it.

The result is that the buildings are net water positive, which is an achievement in California, a state which suffers from chronic water shortages.

Water usage is also reduced by a huge system of ground source heat pumps, the largest in North America. This removes the need for cooling towers, which use an enormous amount of water to cool the air which gets circulated around the complex, meaning that the water consumption needed to cool the buildings is reduced by around 90%.

The canopy has also been designed to balance trade-offs between light and heat to keep down energy usage. The buildings notably lack skylights, which would allow too much California sun to beam in and increase the burden on cooling systems. Instead, each “scallop” frames a huge curved window which lets in enough light to minimise the amount of electric lighting required without heating the building up.

These windows are rotationally symmetrical, meaning that there is always a view outside from wherever you are in the building. “Within a very large floorplate like this that was something that was really important,” Postma says. “Wherever you are, being able to know whether it’s day or night, to sync up with your circadian rhythms, and get a sense of being connected to the outside world”.

Postma说，内部的楼层也是阶梯式的，让人们可以看到窗户，即使站在建筑的中心，也能“从视觉上看到外面的风景”。

This landscape is not necessarily as inspiring as you might hope. While a coastal wetland habitat lies north of the campus, its south is flanked by a large carpark, its east by a cluster of large industrial sheds belonging to NASA, and its west by a canal facing onto office blocks.

Approaching the campus, a staff member on their first visit to the office will start by driving through what is essentially a giant industrial park. But the scene becomes more natural as you approach the Bay View campus, Postma says, as the wetland comes into view.

These wetlands are a nesting ground for the Western Burrowing Owl, which, as their names suggest, dig burrows. In 2008 a pair of the birds, which are listed as a species of special concern in California, built their underground nests on a site where Google planned to build a hotel.

Mountain View council, which owned the plot, evicted the owls and later purchased a plot of land on the adjacent wetland for the birds to move into. Not much of the Bay Area’s original habitat remains, but at least the landscape which has been built on the grounds of Google’s new headquarters could provide a much-needed home for the owls.

So what next for Heatherwick? Now the practice has completed a major commercial project, could it become the next Foster & Partners? Would it design big city office towers, government buildings, train stations, or that most controversial of architectural projects, airports?

“当然，”波斯特马说。“如果它能让我们周围的物理世界对每个人都更好。我们的出发点不是规模或类型学。问题在于我们能否运用我们的设计技巧和思维来帮助人们解决问题。”

他表示，该工作室的未来方向是“继续将我们周围的世界人性化，继续交付项目，希望让城市和城市场所变得更人性化，从根本上说，我们能做的越多越好”。