Google's New HQ: A New Concept for Offices or a Truman Show-esque Nightmare?
You've heard the talk of a bubble in Silicon Valley, now Google is planning to build a physical one to enclose its Mountain View Campus.
Amid a surprising lack of fanfare, Google recently released the plans for its new Mountain View Headquarters. Here is a rendering of the glass bubbles the tech giant is proposing to construct...
The shiny new campus was designed in collaboration between starchitect Bjarke Ingels and star designer Thomas Heatherwick. Bjarke is best-known for his Mountain Dwelling project and pseudo-inspirational self-promotional videos on YouTube. While Heaterwick is best known for his ephemeral Seed Cathedral.
The design for google is all soaring translucent canopies and 'modular' elements that can be adapted to change the building's functions internally. Of course, this is all topped off with happy looking cyclists and people walking in fields. Lovely, but you have to question how likely all this biking and walking is in Silicon Valley, one of the world's most car-dependant regions. Also, note the abandoned freeway in all of the arial renderings. Eery.
And while the architects tout the building's ability to adapt to changing needs, it all spanks of marketing spin and buzz-wordery.
Google themselves point out that some of the technology needed for the Googleplex's construction doesn't even exist yet - namely the robots tasked with reconfiguring office spaces (Robots, really?!). The barriers of present-day technology shouldn't be a huge problem for one of the world's best and richest innovators, but ultimately the design falls flat not because of its futuristic technology, but because it's actually not futuristic enough. We've seen this trope before, big glass bubbles with mini cities inside. It reminds us of shopping malls, biospheres and Zorbing. As architecture critic Edwin Heathcote puts it, “the designs for Google’s huge new Mountain View HQ look oddly like a vision of the future from somewhere in the past.”
Perhaps the least flattering description of the building is drawing parallels to a novel by Dave Eggers. As Heathcote points out, the novel tells the story "of a sinister tech company with The Circle and its seductive campus landscape, which turns out to be a Truman Show-style nightmare of total surveillance."
This project is just the next in a series of lacklustre Silicon Valley Headquarter designs from the world's most famous architects. Then again, if you compare Google's seemingly transparent and permeable vision of the future (which, if you believe Eggers, turns out to be an exercise in mass-surveillance) with Apple's insular and authoritarian 'Infinity Loop' perhaps both buildings are right on the money...
Google's vision for the future.
Compared with Apple's proposed new Headquarters.
What do you think about Google's new pad? Cutting edge, or a little too Truman Show?
