You would think they would be more innovative. Google, the company that has been disrupting how we live, work, and play for decades now, has recently been working on leaving its imprint on the meatscape. After years of inhabiting the former headquarters of Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif., designed by Charles Dilworth, FAIA, then of Studios Architecture, the company has set about building its own signature office space, which looks to be a mash-up between a 1970s suburban terrace office structure and a big-top tent. Positioning itself between the bravura form making of Apple’s Norman Foster, Hon. FAIA-designed HQ, and the faux-renovation Facebook commissioned from Frank Gehry, FAIA, Google is trying to be both spectacular and disarmingly humanistic.
As Google has expanded its built footprint around the world, it has largely relied on existing buildings or background structures to house its operations. Now the company is looking not only to expand its footprint in its native Silicon Valley, but also to make a larger play into housing—and even city making—with more than $20 billion in construction. The results leave little to complain about, other than we would expect something more creative and daring from a company so innovative and wealthy.
The first project to near the spades-in-the-ground phase is Middlefield Park, a collaboration between Google and Australia’s development giant Lendlease (architects include SERA, Hassell, Kristen Hall City Design, and CMG Landscape Architecture). Google describes the project as “a multifunctional complete neighborhood where people can both live and work.” It aims to transform 40 acres of mainly tilt-up two-story office and warehouse buildings near company headquarters into a home for up to 3,500 new residents, along with 50,000 square feet of “retail and community space” (an odd conflation, in my opinion) grouped around 12 acres of open space. Any new office space development (and there will be up to 650,000 square feet of that) is relegated to the background.
All the buildings will be “sustainable,” which, from the renderings, appears to mean they will rely on the liberal use of manufactured lumber elements. The green space will be accessible, filled with splash fountains, lush planting, and the other features of what we now consider to be a fun park. The apartment buildings will be—well, that is a good question. Based on the renderings, they will be Type III, wood-frame structures that will eschew fake moldings and French Chateau detailing in favor of a gentle push and pull of façade elements in a grid. Of course, 20% of the units in these structures will be subsidized to counter California’s extreme housing crisis.
There is nothing glaringly wrong with this approach, other than the fact that Google should be able to do better. For some time now, the company has been trading on the promise of Sidewalk Labs, headed by former New York Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, which aims to develop the ultimate smart city. But earlier this year, Sidewalk Labs abandoned its biggest experiment, in Toronto, before even breaking ground. The Lab has released a software program, entitled Delve, which, from what I can tell, lets developers avoid hiring architects and consultants as they figure out how to maximize their building envelopes by interactively manipulating zoning and site constraints. It is a far cry from the software Google was developing in Austin, which was meant to integrate all sorts of geological and zoning data with ways to facilitate community participation. So far that research has only produced Flux, a nascent tool for architect-construction interaction.
The largest project in Google's it-will-probably-be-built shortlist is located in downtown San Jose. This one, also a collaboration with Lendlease, is ambitious (architects include SiteLab, Heatherwick Studio, Grimshaw Architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Fougeron Architecture, Solomon Coldwell Buenz, SHoP Architects, Architectural Resources Group, and West 8). The project envisions close to 6,000 dwelling units, more than 7 million square feet of office space, 1,000-plus hotel rooms, half a million square feet of cultural and retail space (again grouped together), around 15 acres of open space, and more than 14,000 parking spaces (fewer than usual for a development of this size) that stretch for a mile west of downtown.
Like the Middlefield Plan, it looks reasonably, well, reasonable, at least as far as anything of this scale can be. There are no towers, shopping malls, or structures that might overwhelm pedestrians. There are only a ton of little to medium-sized boxes strung along pedestrian pathways, connected with green fingers that reach into surrounding neighborhoods, all of it fed by infrastructure Google has tried to tuck away to the extent possible. It will all be sustainable (again, whatever that means), riparian landscapes will be restored, and the development will support frequent street festivals, markets, and other fun urban events. (The fountains, complete with children leaping through them, reappear from the atmosphere renderings for the Middlefield proposal.) Some old buildings will be preserved, even if most of the existing houses on the project site—several blocks of modest homes and more warehouses—will disappear.
If you are going to expand your downtown, in other words, you could do a lot worse, just as the Middlefield development will be an improvement over the soulless miasma of Google’s current surroundings. Still, you would think the creative types at Google, fed by their endless free lattes and seemingly unlimited budgets, could come up with something that would respond to the issues that any new investment at this scale should treat as the focal point. For starters: true housing and community equity and inclusion; building with the land, not on it (landscape urbanism); and creating structures that go beyond “sustainable” buzzwords and that in their construction and operation don’t lay waste to our planet. I see none of these things in Google’s current plans.
For a long time, we have been told that the government has failed to provide meaningful models for innovation and has done more harm than good. Private companies, unfettered by bureaucracies and interest groups, spurred on by competition, and working in pursuit of the value-add, are the ones leading the way in building better worlds. Yet time and time again we have received nothing but mediocrity and self-serving development from corporations whose valuations exceed the GDPs of many countries. Development plans by Google shouldn’t just be OK. We deserve more from the Empire of Search.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
