Dive summary:
- A rendering that Google has had done of a new headquarters campus near San Francisco Bay in Mountain View, Calif., shows nine rectangular buildings bent sideways and grouped around a central area, and the company's real estate chief, David Radcliffe, says no employee will be more than 2.5 minutes from any other worker on the campus.
- The goal, Radcliffe told Vanity Fair magazine, with which it shared the design, is to encourage "casual collisions of the work force" so people can almost literally bounce ideas off others as soon as they form them.
- Building its own offices is a new approach for the information giant, which Radcliffe likened to a hermit crab that is always finding other people's abandoned shells (office buildings) and moving into them.
From the article:
In 2011 it went so far as to hire the German architect Christophe Ingenhoven to design a brand new, super-green structure on a site next to the Googleplex, but that was a false start: the company abandoned the project a year later....
