Googleplex
The Googleplex is the headquarters of the US company Google LLC and is located in Mountain View , California . The original facility with around 185,806 m² is the second largest building by Google in terms of area (No. 1 is the 269,418 m² building 111 Eighth Avenue in New York City, bought by Google in 2010). As soon as the 102,193 m² extension is completed, it will be Google's largest building at 287,999 m².
The term Googleplex is both a case word from Google and complex as well as an allusion to Googolplex , the name for the number 10 googol (10 10 100 ). The word was originally defined by Edward Kasner and James Newman in the 1940 book Mathematics and the imagination . It was also used in the 1979 book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , where it refers to the Googleplex Starthinker.
Establishment and history
Original campus
SGI campus
The four core buildings, a total of 47,038 m², were originally built and used by Silicon Graphics . The office space and the campus take up 110,000 m², 20,000 m² of which is the publicly accessible Charleston Park, which is adjacent to a 21.4 km long stream. The project, which was launched in 1994, was built on the site of a labor camp for prisoners and at the time still belonged to the city (referred to as arable land in the planning documents) and was developed in cooperation with SGI, the SWA Group from San Francisco , Sausalito, and the Mountain View City's Planning and Community Development Agency. The aim was to develop a privately owned corporate headquarters with an adjacent public green area. The plans for the site included an underground parking lot for 2,000 cars so that SWA could integrate the two open spaces with water features, shallow ponds, fountains, paths, squares and a gigantic statue of a dinosaur. In 1997 the project was completed. The American Society of Landscape Architects pointed out in 1999 that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate premises and challenged conventional thinking about private and public space.
Studios Architecture was the executive architectural office for the original SGI Campus, on condition that they were responsible for both the interior architecture and the building design.
Google campus
From 2003 the complex was rented by Google, in 2005 a redesign of the interior by Clive Wilkinson Architects was completed, in June 2006 Google bought the buildings from four different real estate companies for 319 million US dollars. Because the buildings are all fairly flat, they take up a lot of space. The interior of the headquarters is decorated with items such as lampshades and rubber balls. The lobby has a piano and a projection of the Google searches that have just been processed. The facilities include a sports hall (Building 40), free laundries (Buildings 40, 42 and CL3), two small swimming pools, a beach volleyball court and eighteen canteens with different choices. Google has also created replicas of the SpaceShipOne and a dinosaur skeleton.
From late 2006 to early 2007, the company installed a number of solar modules capable of generating approximately 1.6 megawatts of electricity. At the time, it was the largest private installation in the United States. Around 30 percent of the energy required by the Googleplex comes from this project, the rest is purchased from other providers. A third of the modules were installed on the roofs of the parking lots, the rest on the roofs of the facility. The solar module project went into operation on June 18, 2007. On June 21, 2007, Google had already installed 90 percent of the 9,212 modules.
Four 100 kW strong Bloom Energy Server were delivered to Google in July 2008, so that Google's first customer was Bloom Energy.
Bay view cultivation
In 2013, construction began on a new 102,193 m² headquarters, called Bay View, next to the original campus on 17 acres, rented from NASA Ames Research Center and overlooking the San Francisco Bay nearby from Moffett Federal Airfield . The estimated cost of the project is $ 120 million with a target opening date of 2015 [obsolete] .
NBBJ is the architectural firm that allowed Google to design its own building for the first time instead of moving into a building from previous companies.
The complex is located on the northeast corner of the property at Stevens Creek Nature Area / Shoreline Park. Before announcing the construction of the facility, Google sought permission from Mountain View to build a bridge over Stevens Creek. In the 2012 year-end report, Google found that they only had the budget for a 3 hectare area instead of the 17 hectares.
Location
The Googleplex is near the Shoreline Amphitheater to the north, Intuit to the northwest, and the Microsoft Research Complex and the Mozilla Foundation and the Computer History Museum to the south. It is located between Charleston Road, Amphitheater Parkway, and Shoreling Boulevard in northern Mountain View, California close to Shoreline Park wetland. Employees who live in East Bay or South Bay, San Francisco can take a free WiFi-enabled Google shuttle to and from work. The shuttle buses are powered by a fuel mixture of 95% petroleum diesel and 5% biodiesel and have the latest technology to reduce emissions.
Other Google Mountain View locations
Google stated in its 2012 year-end report that it owned 32.5 acres of office space in Mountain View.
Google has another large campus in Mountain View called "The Quad" at 399 N WhismanRoad about 3 miles from Googleplex.
There is also the Google X Lab , which is the development laboratory for items such as Google Glass . The building is a normal two story red brick house about half a mile from the Googleplex. It has fountains out front and rows of company-provided bicycles that staff can use to get to the main campus.
Web link
Individual evidence
- ↑ For the Google motto Don't be evil, cf. Eike Kühl: Google says what's bad. In: Zeit Online. Retrieved February 4, 2016 . .
- ↑ Jens Minor: Google buys its own Googleplex - GWB. In: googlewatchblog.de. June 16, 2006, accessed December 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Now Google sets sights on solar system ( Memento from November 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), SFGate , English
- ↑ Google Plants Solar Trees , Wired.com , English
Coordinates: 37 ° 25 '18.6 " N , 122 ° 5' 2.5" W.