Google joins the headquarter redesign spree along with major tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, as it unveiled on Friday the designs of the headquarters campus it intends to build in the future.
The proposal would require an expansion of 2.5 million square feet in Mountain View, Calif. to house 10,000 new employees.
"Today we're submitting a plan to redevelop four sites-places where we already have offices but hope to significantly increase our square footage-to the Mountain View City Council. It's the first time we'll design and build offices from scratch and we hope these plans by Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio will lead to a better way of working," David Radcliffe, vice president for real estate in Google, wrote in a blog post.
The new headquarters feature interior walls that can be moved to alter the size and shape of the rooms to maximize the use. It will also have parks and retail space so that employees would feel like that they are going to a neighborhood instead of office buildings.
"It's going to be a bold and very innovative campus," Ken Rosenberg, a member of Mountain View's City Council, told The Wall Street Journal. "There's a tremendous amount of glass so you will feel like you're outside when you're inside."
Construction is expected to start once the Mountain View authorities approve the proposal. The authorities are already concerned about the possible big traffic that the additional employees would bring, especially that housing wasn't mentioned in the plan. There is also the issue of overrunning the small city which is strongly opposed by residents, the New York Times reported. To date, Google is occupying about 7.3 million square feet of office space in Mountain View.
The search giant proposed to build about 5,000 housing units in the North Bayshore area, to at least ease the traffic, but the authorities slammed the idea due to wildlife concerns and other issues.
Google CEO Larry Page said that he plans to expand the company workforce from 52,600 employees to one million after redesigning the headquarters.
