The workplace has changed dramatically.
When we first started this project
we wanted to think differently.
St. John's Terminal is
the opportunity for us to reimagine
how we work together in this radically different context.
Google's a place that is all about innovation. It's all about testing and learning.
If you're gonna make that commute in,
it should be because you can work with people that have passion,
that have ideas, that you can sit next to
and come up with something that you couldn't do just on your own.
and that's really the vision of this space.
If we had done this a few years earlier,
we would have approached things very differently.
It gave us an amazing opportunity to just stop,
and think about how we can best build our space for the way people want to work.
We've seen at Google that big ideas come from small, close-knit teams.
So as we look how people are working,
People are not coming in to sit in one space amid a sea of desks.
They want to be together.
So we took a different approach designing St. John's Terminal:
It's team-first,
and every team has its own "neighborhood."
Spaces for all types of Googlers to come and do all types of work.
Whether that's heads-down work leaning in,
Meeting others, and just connecting and collaborating.
Googlers can decide how the neighborhood space will work best for them as a team
They have a sense of community and a sense of belonging.
But it goes way beyond neighborhoods.
Creativity wants to move around.
So we've created as much common spaces as we have neighborhood space, if not more,
for people to meet, to work, to collaborate.
Some feel like a library, some feel like a coffee shop.
So people have options to use spaces that they feel most comfortable in.
Architecture is an art of connections.
St. John's Terminal was built in 1934
as the terminus of the New York Central Railroad West Side Improvement Project,
what we now call The High Line.
It originally spanned right over Houston street
blocking our view of the river.
So the very first thing we did was cut through the building,
revealing the railroad beds that were there historically.
But what it really did was help connect us as a community with our waterfront.
St. John's Terminal is the lowest twelve-story building that we could possible create.
It allows for the conditions for physical connection across all the floors.
The richest kinds of spaces we can make are ones where we feel connected indoors and outdoors.
St. John's Terminal was an enormous collaboration.
And what's been accomplished here is not just an acre and a half of beautiful green spaces,
but ecology with 95% native plant species.
It has solar panels and stormwater retention.
All of these things that you'd expect from the highest levels of sustainability.
Many people don't remember, in the 25-year history of Google in New York City,
we started with one salesperson, working out of a coffee shop on the Upper West Side.
So dial forward to today,
New York will be the largest site for the Global Business Organization in North America
So many of our clients are actually here,
and it's reflective of that kind of diversity and dynamism that makes us so excited to call this our home.
Our North Star is always about helping our customers grow.
And they grow when we spend time with them,
and we problem solve together.
We always like to say, you find the magic, you find the people, and you connect the two.
And this space that we have here is designed to do that.
And it's not gonna be the office experience that we're used to.
It's gonna be collaborative, it's gonna be human, it's gonna be so "Google."