Google is opening its new Mountain View campus in California this week and will focus on one core principle to address the future of work: flexibility.
The Bay View campus boasts two office buildings, a 1,000-person event space, as well as 240 short-term hotel units on 42 acres of land. The office will cater to its ads products team, which is led by Jerry Dischler.
This mark’s Google’s first ground-up campus development, as opposed to its other campuses that have been reconstructed using pre-existing buildings.
While the cost of this campus has not been released, it is part of the company’s 20 projects that are receiving about $10 billion in investments this year.
Flexibility has been the name of the game for companies like Google who are trying to usher workers back into the office. With this in mind, the campus has incorporated amenities and resources that make a hybrid workplace more attainable and agile.
This includes modular desks, enclosed workspaces, open floor plans, various workspace sizes, and more. Additionally, Google is amping up its wellness features, offering natural light, teepee-shaped workspaces, and courtyards.
“As we started with a blank canvas, we had to ask ourselves another set of questions and that was simply ‘what will work look like in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 100 years?‘” said David Radcliffe, VP of Workplace and Real Estate at Google.
“And I’ll be honest, the conclusion we came to was ‘we have no idea.’ But what we did know was it meant we had to be extra, extra focused on flexibility. This building had to be able to transform itself over its lifetime in order to respond to the demands being put on by the business.”