Google Unveils Plan for New Corporate Campus

The campus plan, designed by Heatherwick Studio of London and the Bjarke Ingels Group of Denmark, is more than architectural eye candy. If built, it would completely overhaul the sleepy North Bayshore neighborhood that surrounds Google’s headquarters. It is, however, just a proposal, one of several that were submitted to Mountain View’s planning department as part of a long-running redevelopment effort.

North Bayshore is a sprawling expanse of low-slung office buildings surrounded by acres of parking. Google’s proposal would add bike trails, bridges and retail space. Assuming Mountain View’s City Council allowed developers to build new housing units — something that members of the city’s incoming council have been pushing for — it would turn the area around Google into a kind of second downtown.

Google owns or leases about 7.3 million square feet of office space in Mountain View, according to Transwestern, a commercial real estate brokerage. Today, its patchwork campus is spread across mismatched buildings throughout the city. At the lunch hour, it looks a bit like a high school campus, with packs of employees crossing busy streets on their way to company cafeterias or riding along the road on multicolored bikes.

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