Google unveils an innovative new campus in Silicon Valley designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio

Google's first-ever ground-up campus, BAY VIEW, was designed by BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studio in close collaboration with Google. The campus has a mission to operate on carbon-free energy, 24 hours a day, seven days a week by 2030, and has been created to deliver on Google's ambition to create human-centric, sustainable innovations for the future of its workplace. The campus also aims to provide scalable, replicable solutions for the construction industry and beyond.

Situated on a 42-acre site at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, the Google Bay View Campus comprises three buildings, totalling 1.1 million sq ft, with 20 acres of open space, two workspace buildings, a 1,000-person event centre, and 240 short-term employee accommodation units. The three buildings are constructed as lightweight canopy structures optimized for interior daylight, views, collaboration, experiences, and activities.

The design of the campus is anchored in three themes defined by Google's design brief at the beginning of the project - innovation, nature, and community. The design is focused on flexibility and providing an extraordinary user experience that inspires collaboration and co-creation. The team spaces are located on the upper level, and gathering spaces are situated below, separating focus and collaborative areas while still providing easy access to both. The second-floor design includes variations in floorplates to give teams a designated "neighbourhood" area that is highly flexible to change with their needs.

“Our design of the new Bay View campus is the result of an incredibly collaborative design process. Working with a client as data-driven as Google has led to an architecture where every single decision is informed by hard information and empirical analysis. The result is a campus where the striking dragon-scale solar canopies harvest every photon that hits the buildings; the energy piles store and extract heating and cooling from the ground, and even the naturally beautiful floras are in fact hardworking rootzone gardens that filter and clean the water from the buildings. All in all, a campus where the front of house and back of house, technology and architecture, and form and function have been fused into a new and striking hybrid,” says Bjarke Ingels, Founder and Creative Director, BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group.