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Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work

by 추산봉 2015. 7. 23.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/googles-monastic-vision-for-the-future-of-work

 

Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work

 

The recently proposed version of the Googleplex annex, by Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, would be sprawling and bike-friendly, with movable modular offices.

The recently proposed version of the Googleplex annex, by Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, would be sprawling and bike-friendly, with movable modular offices. Credit COURTESY OF GOOGLE

Google may dream in the manner of a Californian, but it has mostly lived like a New Yorker. For years, the tech giant’s Mountain View headquarters sat on leased property, the corporate equivalent of a rented pad downtown. on moving in, Google did something like a spackle-and-paint job (a costly interior renovation, in 2005), and tried to make the place its own (the famous multicolored bikes). Yet even as the company grew, the Googleplex remained appropriated space, shaped by the architecture of its last inhabitant, Silicon Graphics. Microsoft and Apple built much of their homesteads from the ground up; Google, like the Greenwich Village resident who turns a nonworking fireplace into an ingenious wine rack, made do with the space as it came.

The company didn’t actually purchase its ’Plex until 2006. By that point, it had started to find crash pads elsewhere—in New York, it inhabits the massive former Port Authority Building—and expansion seemed to draw its attention away from home. It wasn’t until the late in the past decade that Google began treating its vast Silicon Valley property as a long-term project. on a home-improvement kick, it installed a huge array of solar panels, and worked intensely on the landscaping. Today, the campus includes scores of buildings of various scales, radiating out from the original core. It sits on twenty-six acres of bay-adjacent land, which Google has at times maintained with the aid of two hundred goats.

For years, the company has also hoped to do what every rich homeowner cresting into middle age does: build an addition. Google’s recent ideal was a new annex campus jointly designed by the architecture firms of Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels. The facility would center on four sprawling agglomerations of office and leisure space, each housed under a massive, biodome-like glass skin. Ramps instead of stairs would make the buildings bike-friendly; modular offices could be picked up and moved around, like shipping containers, by a giant robotic crane.

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One of the most dramatic features of the Heatherwick and Ingels campus would be a swooping canopy of glass skins. COURTESY OF GOOGLE

The neighbors, naturally, objected. Last month, the seven-person Mountain View City Council turned down most of Google’s plan, instead approving five hundred thousand square feet of office space—about a quarter of what Google requested—and awarded the remaining 1.5 million square feet to LinkedIn, Google’s nearest techie neighbor. The council’s restrictions meant that Google would be able to build, at most, one of its four proposed buildings. The company’s real-estate chief said he doubted that the scaled-down version would be “economically viable.” As of this month, the company’s hope is to adapt the plan for another location entirely.

The Heatherwick and Ingels design, though, was only the most recent of several reconceptions of the Googleplex. Today, Google’s architectural per-Plexity offers certain windows onto Silicon Valley’s changing ideas about work culture and corporate community, a blend of workplace flexibility and intellectual hermeticism. If the Valley has a premise these days, it is that anything is possible—as long as there are generous resources and no interventions from outside.

For Google, this journey of self-realization through architecture became serious in 2011, when it commissioned a new engineering and management building, from the German architect Christoph Ingenhoven. “The site demands a building with autarkic geometry,” he said. In other words, it should be self-contained. Ingenhoven’s particular emphasis was on the ecology of the new structure, which was to form the heart of Google’s “green campus.” (Greenness is a common value in most Silicon Valley complexes, sustainability being both the least controversial of the industry’s efficiencies and, ideally, a way of lowering operating costs.) Google had planned to start construction in 2012, but, instead it abruptly dismissed Ingenhoven and began looking to other drawing boards.

For a while, it seemed to favor N.B.B.J., a Seattle firm with more varied ambitions. Instead of just adding a building, N.B.B.J. drafted plans for an entire second Googleplex, in a nearby swath of land the company called Bay View. This new complex would center on nine buildings in the shape of stubby hockey sticks, connected by pedestrian bridges; five of the buildings would have “green” roofs, covered with grass and plants, that could serve as gathering places—parks that were, literally, part of the office. The goal of the design was to streamline many of the functions of a healthy creative life (work, play, Keatsian walks through flowers), while encouraging “casual” interactions among employees. As the architecture journalist Paul Goldberger pointed out in an early report, the project was supposed to set a standard for design using Big Data. Google purported to have huge amounts of quantitative information about its employees’ work habits, and, although the campus would cover 1.1 million square feet, its elements were linked for fast, productive interaction. If the Ingenhoven building was to project an image outward, the N.B.B.J. design was about looking inward and pulling the Googlers close.

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The Heatherwick and Ingels model synthesized these two approaches. To design a long-term home for a tech company is a paradoxical feat: the industry, almost by definition, deals in rapid obsolescence and uncertain fates. This concern figured strongly in the new design, which a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story recently touted as “future-proof.”

But it turns out that future-proofed life looks a lot like the vacuum-packed present. The external concerns of the Heatherwick and Ingels design center on the environment: a pedestrian overpass above the freeway, more expanses of sustainable landscaping. Inside, it is about turning Google into not only a life style but a fully realized life. Like the current Googleplex, the new campus would employ open floor plans. The glass canopy skins, the proposed site’s most distinctive feature, would eliminate the need for normal walls, opening the campus to the world outside while sealing it from unwanted elements. There would be greenery—lots of it—but some would be under the dome, a preserve within a preserve. In its design, Google hoped to create a self-sufficient world where, literally and figuratively, the rain could never fall.

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The Heatherwick and Ingels design, with its emphasis on vastness and green space both in and out, plays on the idea of a homestead as a place where family members can gather to live and work. COURTESY OF GOOGLE

Many, if not most, large tech companies have gathered their resources close in this way. Apple, under Steve Jobs, famously used abnormal screws to keep unapproved tinkerers from opening up his products; the company’s new cornerless space-survival colony of a headquarters is many things, but it’s not open and loose. Facebook’s new campus, designed by Frank Gehry, also boasts many ecological features, and it proudly displays furniture and art works that evoke the homey domesticity of an after-school crafts fair. Facebook, like Google, has pursued its own company housing in recent years, hoping to bring its best and brightest even closer to the corporate coffee bar.

The idea of living not just near one’s employer but in a world of its creation will sound horrifying to many workers: company towns were supposed to have vanished as an industrial-age perversion. But there are socially responsible reasons for holding employees in lavish corporate dorms. For one thing, it keeps them from messing with the local real estate. As I reported in the magazine last year, the greater Bay Area is in the throes of an acute housing crisis, exacerbated, if not caused, by forces attending tech’s wild ascent. The value of employee housing, if built from the ground up, is one of the few points on which large tech companies and housing activists see eye to eye. For the companies, too, there’s a promise of fruitful cohesion (the group that lives together grows together) and productivity (no trains to catch).

It’s less clear how tech giants are served by campuses that tune out the outside world. When organized monasticism took root with the Buddhists, in the fourth century B.C., it was the result not of religious insularity but of secular wealth. To shelter nomadic monks was thought to be admirable, so those with faith and money sought to institutionalize the practice. Twenty-five hundred years later, perhaps not too much has changed. To the extent that Google has done its business on the premises of enlightenment (“Universally accessible and useful”) and virtue (“Don’t be evil”), its research for the future shares a questing optimism—and a reverent isolationism—with the studious faiths of the past.

In the autumn, Google announced a new slogan for its Android operating system: “Be together, not the same.” The Heatherwick and Ingels plan seems to embrace a similar ideal. In Google, the longstanding idea of the corporate family, traceable to Peter Drucker’s “The Concept of the Corporation” (1946), may reach both its modern peak and its creative limit. Can one work in a giant lizard tank while doing acute, innovative work that serves the world outside the glass? Every family leader wants to build a generous homestead, but imaginative life is more often at home in walkups, in the messy parts of town.

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