Future San Francisco - Google Headquarters by Bjarke Ingels

[Music] [Music] Silicon Valley has been the cradle of the surf series of innovations that over the last decades have propelled technology and world economy but all of the resources all of the intelligence has been invested into the immaterial the digital realm the internet it was fascinating to be seeing the physical reality of a valley that has changed the world and that Valley actually itself hasn't changed tech really hasn't adopted a particular language for building I mean we've just found old buildings we've moved into them and and we've made do best we could we have an opportunity to build new buildings which is nothing unique which people do every day all over the world but what we've tried to do is take a step back and say how do buildings who work with nature you know what will transit look like in the future not what is transit today we're really making sure that we make space is very open and accessible so it's just not for Googlers but it's for anyone who lives in the area to come by and then the last piece which is really Google at its heart and anything we do trying to leave the project giving something back to the world that they didn't have before we started we scour the world looking for a special architect we could really do something different we really listened and created stuff gonna ground up and we really got down to what we believed were the two best in class my name is Blackey ingles I'm an architect and the founder of diagonals group or simply big the big studios they're ambitious they do a lot of very community focused projects and I was pretty compelling to Asperger them it's a good reaction about Craigs my name is Thomas haddock I'm the founder of Heather Wix to do Thomas on the other hand has this attention to human scale and beauty that I haven't seen in anyone before and you bring those two people together somebody really thinks of a function form and you couple that with beauty and you just have this team that that's pretty amazing stuff when we met each other in Mountain View we thought that it would be interesting to work with each other and Google to maybe come up with something that would be much more creative than anything we could have come up with ourselves [Music] what is the best possible environment we can make to invent engineer and most important make ideas happen and go out into the world [Music] when you visit the google campus there's lots of trees but there's this constant major undermining of that by the the road system and the infrastructure required for all of those cars it just feels like treason like street furniture and everything has turned into parking lots we're trying to sort of reverse this process and really sort of recreate some of the natural qualities that have been there in the first place really transform the sea of packing that you find today into a sort of a natural landscape where you'll find an abundance of green both outside but also inside these are greenhouses that's enclosed and protect pieces of nature next to ecologically sensitive areas we're able to pull back buildings and create wildlife habitat we're able to create areas where we're restoring waterways that bring water out to the bay it's interesting to try and look at how you can really augment or turn the dial up more on on that nature at the same time as looking to really protect the the land use Google's presence in Mountain View is simply so strong that it can't be a fortress that shut away in nature that shuts away that the neighbors it really needs to become a neighborhood in Mountain View a motivator for the work we're doing now is to be generous you can provide facilities that can be shared with people who don't work for an organization and keep an organization's feet on the ground the buildings themselves allow both the public as well as employees to move through them we wanted to make sure that we create a community where bikes and pedestrians felt like they didn't have to worry about cars zipping by at 70 miles an hour part of our work is to try to find ways to make places that you would go and have a conversation and go for a walk with great pleasure and choose in a weekend to be so in that sense our idea for the Google campus is really to give it the diversity the liveliness that you find in an urban neighborhood so that a lot of the traditional distinctions in an urban setting or in an office environment will have evaporated or at least been blurred significantly how will we work five years from now how it worked 15 or 20 years from now we don't know what it's gonna be but we know that it just needs to be this incredibly flexible space for it to work in nature things aren't over programmed or over prescribed and in a way if our cities or our work environments could have more of this flexibility or openness for interpretation they would become more stimulating and more creative environments to live and work in in a traditional building reconfiguring from office space to automotive to biotech would take months and years and you would knock those buildings down and then five or ten years later you'd do it again the desire really is to try to create pieces of environment you can work in in multiple ways suddenly within this architecture of the building becomes almost like giant pieces of furniture that can be connected in different ways it's almost like the Lincoln Logs when we were kids you can just pile them up and assemble them differently with basically no materials it's a structure of looking in a way at the historic city model of making streets and then this is not the historic model of making environments that bring together and protect those streets instead of having buildings as these like boxes with walls and floors to dissolve the building into simple super transparent ultralight membrane creating effect a piece of glass fabric and draping it across in ten poles and we're blurring the outside world in the inside world we're really thinking about how do we create buildings that draw less energy how do we create buildings that use less water than a traditional building and all of this science and know-how is going into this project we will keep developing we'll keep researching in terms of materials or technologies the architecture will evolve as as times evolve there oh there are ways that we can try and make space that isn't just for next five or ten years but for many decades to come between like these three different minds or three different companies working together I think we have really arrived at something that I'm dead certain we wouldn't have arrived that if any one of us were like working in an isolation [Music] we have a duty to reflect in the physical environment the values that have been manifested in the innovations that have come out from this part of California a humanistic spirit is something that it feels really important to embody in what we built and so that's shared between all of us and is exciting and driving us and we'll be in its way revolutionary [Music] you

Channel: Cities of the Future

Views: 4,412

Rating: 4.8350515 out of 5

Keywords: big, bjarke ingels, san francisco, california, america, google, hq, headquarters, future, architecture, education, technology, huawei, tech, urbanism

Id: LFKFwTKX2uA

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Goreagnome]

Will be delayed and in limbo for a few years, but will most likely happen eventually if Google was very committed to it. Covid isn't going to last forever.

[u/cheekywill]

there's a bunch of smaller amoebas (as I've heard it called among some mountain view residents) under construction currently. The design is modified from what the original renders show.

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/google-hq-big-heatherwick-canopy-images-09-11-2019/