Google Planning 42-Acre 'Bay View' Expansion to Googleplex

All hail the new Googleplex. Er, rather, the Googleplex expansion.

According to a new article in Vanity Fair, Google is planning to launch a second campus neighboring its current Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

The 1.1-million-square-foot campus, dubbed "Bay View," will eat up around 42 acres of space with its nine different buildings. From the top, they look like a Tetris game gone awry – buildings that would themselves be nice and rectangular were they not all featuring a dramatic bend roughly right in the middle. Or, to put it another way, they look like a giant Google gathering for the letter "J."

However, there's a method to Google's architectural madness. As Vanity Fair's Paul Goldberger reports, Google – in typical Google fashion – went on a data-collecting spree prior to deciding exactly what it wanted the shape and scale of its Bay View complex to look like. In essence, the company wanted to first figure out all the little nuances of how its employees work together, under the premise that its headquarters expansion should more closely bring together groups and workers who frequently interact.

The J-shaped buildings and overall design for Bay View that emerged allegedly ensures that every single employee working at Google's new complex will be, at most, a 2.5-minute walk from any other Bay View employee. Or, as civil engineer David Radcliffe puts it in Vanity Fair's article, "You can't schedule innovation."

"We want to create opportunities for people to have ideas and be able to turn to others right there and say, 'What do you think of this,'" Radcliffe added.

The nine Bay View buildings will all be interconnected with bridges and feature an assortment of cafes and other meeting spaces – and green roofs, in some instances — that will help the new campus align with the existing Googleplex's look and feel. Seattle-based architecture firm NBBJ is handling the project in total, which includes the fun fact that Bay View's proposed (and energy efficient) radiant heating solution will be the nation's largest for an office complex.

"The existing buildings have a relaxed and casual, even whimsical, quality to their interiors, as if to say that pleasure is a part of efficiency; I'm not sure how Google quantifies this except by seeing how many workers like it, but here, too, the plan is to continue on the same track, even if the new buildings aren't likely to feel quite as improvised," Goldberger writes.

So, who wins the "coolest new campus" award? Google's Bay View or Apple's Spaceship?