(Bjarke) Silicon Valley has been the cradle
of this series of innovations that over the last decades
have propelled technology and world economy.
But all of the resources, all of the intelligence,
has been invested into the immaterial,
the digital realm, the internet.
It was just fascinating to be seeing the physical reality
of a valley that has changed the world,
and that valley actually itself hasn't changed.
(David) Tech really hasn't adopted
a particular language for buildings.
I mean, we've just found old buildings,
we've moved into them, and we've made do best we could.
We have an opportunity to build new buildings,
which is nothing unique, which people do every day,
all over the world,
but what we've tried to do is take a step back
and say, "How do buildings work with nature?"
You know, "What will transit look like in the future?"
Not "What is transit today?"
We're really making sure that we make spaces
very open and accessible so it's just not for Googlers,
but it's for anyone who lives in the area to come by.
And then the last piece, which is really Google at its heart,
in anything we do, trying to leave the project
giving something back to the world,
that they didn't have before we started.
(David) We scoured the world, looking for a special architect,
who could really do something different,
who really listened and created stuff from the ground up.
And we really got down to what we believed were
the two best in class.
You guys. [laughs]
My name is Bjarke Ingels. I'm an architect
and the founder of Bjarke Ingels Group,
or simply BIG.
(David) The BIG Studios, they're ambitious.
They do a lot of very community-focused projects,
and that was pretty compelling to us.
Good actually. Good reaction, by the way.
My name is Thomas Heatherwick.
I'm the founder of Heatherwick Studio.
(David) Thomas, on the other hand, has this attention
to human scale and beauty that I haven't seen in anyone before.
And you bring those two people together--
somebody who really thinks about function and form
and you couple that with beauty,
and you just have this team that does pretty amazing stuff.
(Bjarke) When we met each other in Mountain View,
we thought that it would be interesting
to work with each other and Google,
to maybe come up with something that would be much more creative
than anything we could have come up with ourselves.
(Thomas) What is the best possible environment we can make
to invent, engineer, and most importantly, make ideas happen
and go out into the world?
- It's cool. - It's cool.
(Thomas) When you visit the Google campus,
there's lots of trees.
But there's this constant, major undermining of that
by the road system and the infrastructure
required for all of those cars.
And it just feels like trees are, like, street furniture.
(Bjarke) And everything has turned into parking lots.
We're trying to sort of reverse this process,
and really sort of recreate some of the natural qualities
that have been there in the first place,
really transform the sea of parking that you find today
into a--sort of a natural landscape,
where you'll find an abundance of green both outside,
but also inside.
(Thomas) These are greenhouses
that enclose and protect pieces of nature.
(David) Next to ecologically-sensitive areas
we're able to pull back buildings
and create wildlife habitat.
We're able to create areas where we're restoring waterways
that bring water out to the bay.
It's interesting to try and look at how you can
really augment or turn the dial up more on that nature,
at the same time as looking to really protect the land use.
(Bjarke) Google's presence in Mountain View is simply so strong
that it can't be a fortress that shuts away nature,
that shuts away the neighbors.
It really needs to become a neighborhood in Mountain View.
(Thomas) A motivator for the work we're doing now is to be generous.
You can provide facilities that can be shared with people
who don't work for an organization,
and keep an organization's feet on the ground.
(David) The buildings themselves allow
both the public as well as employees to move through them.
We wanted to make sure that we created communities
where bikes and pedestrians felt like
they didn't have to worry about cars zipping by
at 70 miles an hour.
(Thomas) Part of our work is to try to find ways
to make places that you would go and have a conversation
and go for a walk with great pleasure,
and choose in a weekend to be.
(Bjarke) So in that sense, our idea for the Google campus
is really to give it the diversity, the liveliness
that you find in an urban neighborhood
so that a lot of the traditional distinctions in an urban setting
or in an office environment will have evaporated
or at least been blurred significantly.
(David) How will we work five years from now?
How will we work 15 or 20 years from now?
We don't know what it's going to be,
but we know that it just needs to be
this incredibly flexible space for it to work.
(Bjarke) In nature,
things aren't over-programmed or over-prescribed.
And in a way, if our cities or our work environments
could have more of this flexibility
or openness for interpretation, they would become
more stimulating and more creative environments
to live and work in.
In a traditional building, reconfiguring from office space
to automotive to bio-tech would take months and years,
and you would knock those buildings down,
and then, 5 or 10 years later, you'd do it again.
(Thomas) The desire, really, is to try to create pieces of
environment you can work in, in multiple ways.
(Bjarke) Suddenly, within this, the architecture of the building
becomes almost like giant pieces of furniture
that can be connected in different ways.
It's almost like the Lincoln Logs when we were kids.
You can just pile them up and assemble them differently,
with basically no new materials.
(Thomas) It's a sort of structure of looking, in a way,
at the historic city model of making streets,
and then this is not the historic model
of making environments that bring together
and protect those streets.
(Bjarke) Instead of having buildings as these, like,
boxes with walls and floors,
dissolve the building into a simple, super-transparent,
ultra-light membrane...
(Thomas) Creating, in effect, a piece of glass fabric,
and draping it across some tent poles,
and we're blurring the outside world and the inside world.
(David) We're really thinking about
how do we create buildings that draw less energy?
How do we create buildings that use less water
than a traditional building?
And all of this science and know-how
is going into this project.
(Bjarke) We will keep developing, we'll keep researching,
in terms of materials or technologies.
The architecture will evolve, as times evolve.
(Thomas) There are ways that we can try and make space that
isn't just for the next 5 or 10 years,
but for many decades to come.
(Bjarke) Between these three different minds,
or three different companies working together,
I think we have really arrived at something
that I'm dead certain
we wouldn't have arrived at if any one of us were, like,
working in isolation.
(Thomas) We have a duty to reflect, in the physical environment,
the values that have been manifested in the innovations
that have come out from this part of California.
A humanistic spirit is something that--it feels really important
to embody in what we build,
and so that's shared between all of us,
and is exciting and driving us
and will be, in its way,
revolutionary.