(2006-07-11) Google Hq Design

Interesting article on the Design of Google's HQ Office Space. They turned their gaze inward, hiring New York workplace consultant DEGW and the L.A.-based design firm Clive Wilkinson Architects to reexamine and redesign the Googleplex, the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters... A tall, jovial Brit by way of South Africa, Clive Wilkinson is best known for his genre-busting Chiat Day offices, the first in a Frank Gehry-designed building fronted by a pair of Claes Oldenburg binoculars in Venice, California, where ad agency meetings took place in the "boardroom" - at a long meeting table made of surfboards... Wilkinson imagined it as a "town square," an urban meeting point fed by visitors coming in from the lobby, flanked by cafes and dominated by a grand central staircase that encourages people to sit on its steps with outlets for laptops... The learning curve was steep for Wilkinson's entire team. "I started to feel like physical space was almost too primitive a world for these people," says Alexis Rappaport, a principal in Wilkinson's office... When Wilkinson realized that the engineers needed to see clear-cut reasoning behind design decisions, he began to present his plans as a series of solutions, and then Google became receptive. They were especially fond of a typology of work spaces that Wilkinson's office developed. "We tried to create a whole variety of experiences," Rappaport says. After examining the ways that employees actually used their space, the architects came up with a list of 13 different zones and arranged them from hot ("clubhouse": pool table and lounge area) to cold (closed workrooms), depending on the level of interaction they encourage... We were creating a framework for everyone to make their own space," Smudde says. The framework would be meticulously designed, and the engineers would provide the veneer of beautiful chaos. "What was brilliant about Clive's design is that it's a bright white, light space that becomes almost a neutral background for all the stuff they were going to throw at it," Andrew Laing (DEGW) says. "If you'd designed a space that tried to be Googley, it would have been too much."