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Behind
the Glass Curtain at Google HQ
Google's
new headquarters balances its utopian desire for transparency with
its very real need for privacy
7/18/2006
By
Jade Chang
Corin Anderson does not work like most of
the world: his office is a glass tent, which he shares with two
other people. His desk hides behind a complex Rube Goldberg-esque
maze, built by Anderson out of a toy called the Chaos Tower, a sort
of theme park for marbles. Each day he sits in the midst of figurines,
Legos, and stuffed animals, eyes fixed on his computer screen and
earphones strapped on, for hours at a stretch. When he wants a snack,
he walks to the fully stocked micro-kitchen, maybe breaking open
a bag of organic potato chips or grabbing a handful of trail mix.
Twenty percent of the time — with his employer's full approval
— he works on projects of his own devising that are only tangentially
related to his job. And strangest of all, come nightfall he often
has no desire to go home, preferring to get dinner, gratis, in one
of the employee cafés, followed by a few hours playing a
strategic card game with some colleagues in a small meeting room.
Anderson is a software engineer at Google,
which might make him one of the most valuable human-resource commodities
in the world. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the maverick cofounders
of the company, are fanatical about at least two things: preserving
Google's geek Shangri-la culture and changing the way the world
searches for information. (They must be at least mildly interested
in a third — making money — but any talk of cash is considered
distinctly un-Googley.) In early 2004, as they were preparing to
announce the hotly anticipated IPO that would make them both billionaires,
Page and Brin knew that their search engine needed to stay fast
and relevant, which meant their stable of engineers had to do the
same. They were already attracting top talent, skimming the cream
off each season's fresh crop of PhDs. So they turned their gaze
inward, hiring New York workplace consultant DEGW and the L.A.-based
design firm Clive Wilkinson Architects to reexamine and redesign
the Googleplex, the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters.
A tall, jovial Brit by way of South Africa,
Clive Wilkinson is best known for his genre-busting ChiatDay offices,
the first in a Frank Gehry-designed building fronted by a pair of
Claes Oldenburg binoculars in Venice, California, where ad agency
meetings took place in the “boardroom” — at a long
meeting table made of surfboards. The space was a collection of
vibrant, eclectic open offices that loosen up the concept of work,
designed for creative people much like Wilkinson and his team. He
has also created a new campus for the Fashion Institute of Design
& Merchandising that feels more like a boutique hotel than a
school.
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| Photo: Eros Hoagland/Redux |
At entry level the Googleplex — where
the core of the engineering group is housed along with (or so it
is rumored) the cofounders' top secret offices — feels like
another signature space for creative types. The buzzing open space
was conceived, designed, and built out in just under a year in one
of Google's existing buildings. Wilkinson imagined it as a “town
square,” an urban meeting point fed by visitors coming in from
the lobby, flanked by cafés and dominated by a grand central
staircase that encourages people to sit on its steps with outlets
for laptops. At lunchtime the high-ceilinged space is crowded with
groups of coworkers eating together in front of a whiteboard at
least 20 feet long, where Googlers keep adding to a jokey operational
flowchart. (The steps to building a space elevator, something that
the cofounders have been advocating half seriously for years, include
“Hire rogue scientists” and “Hire Richard Branson.”)
A couple of guys in Google T-shirts wrestle with each other, someone
whizzes past the window on an electric scooter, and everywhere people
are sipping on fresh coconuts punched with straws.
The convivial atmosphere was something the
cofounders, who were very involved with the design process, wanted
to foster. For Wilkinson, who is accustomed to clients demanding
revolutionary work spaces, this was nothing unusual. However, after
spending time with Page and Brin and the Google engineers that would
occupy the building, Wilkinson realized that he was dealing with
a distinctly different species of personnel. “We've always
worked with people who were a mix of left and right brain,”
Wilkinson says, “but engineers are very left brain. They might
work in teams, but they require a high level of concentration; they
sit in front of the computer and crunch formulas in the most extraordinary
way.” Despite the fun, “it's a very demanding work culture,”
says Andrew Laing of DEGW, who has done workplace research studies
with other technology companies such as Microsoft. “It's designed
almost as a living environment — it's much more like being
at a university than being in a conventional work environment.”
The learning curve was steep for Wilkinson's
entire team. “I started to feel like physical space was almost
too primitive a world for these people,” says Alexis Rappaport,
a principal in Wilkinson's office. The cofounders were convinced
that their physical space was important, but their approach to it
had always been pragmatic. Google's frugal, slapdash approach to
its offices was a point of pride; the fast-growing company would
expand into the abandoned offices of another defunct tech outfit
and settle in hermit crab-style, reusing furniture and floor plans.
In the beginning the designers and the engineers
had a difficult time adjusting to one another. Page and Brin were
less interested in the aesthetics of the space — for a time
they lobbied for Google's signature lava lamps and toys — than
in circulation and flow. Like their engineers, the cofounders were
all about solutions — a series of fixes that happen fast and
smart. Wilkinson sometimes felt like he was speaking a different
language, one more concerned with an overarching vision eager to
explore conceptual ideas. His team also had to adjust to the reality
of the engineers' workday, which is more anchored to a computer
than those of their usual range of clients.
Initially Google wanted Wilkinson to work
like an engineer, asking both his firm and the Chicago-based Environments
Group to come up with full schematic designs for the space in hopes
of incorporating the best elements of the two, an approach the company
often takes when solving engineering problems. But instead they
ultimately settled on only one firm, after their advisors convinced
them that their original strategy wasn't the way to get an optimal
design. “Most engineers focus so much on how things work and
how they're going to work for them,” says advisory team member
Mary Davidge, a workplace design consultant who has overseen corporate
headquarters and campus planning for other advanced technology companies,
such as EBay, Yahoo!, and Apple. “The way the space is going
to look and feel is often not as important to them. They're also
often less willing to let the designer design it. They're used to
developing solutions.”
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| Courtesy of Clive Wilkinson
Architects |
When Wilkinson realized that the engineers
needed to see clear-cut reasoning behind design decisions, he began
to present his plans as a series of solutions, and then Google became
receptive. They were especially fond of a typology of work spaces
that Wilkinson's office developed. “We tried to create a whole
variety of experiences,” Rappaport says. After examining the
ways that employees actually used their space, the architects came
up with a list of 13 different zones and arranged them from hot (“clubhouse”:
pool table and lounge area) to cold (closed workrooms), depending
on the level of interaction they encourage. Each floor of the building
was divided into five or six flexible neighborhoods separated by “landmarks,”
the shared public spaces that are the center of Google life. There
are kitchens full of snacks, lounges with pool tables and comfortable
seating, and libraries of stacked plywood box shelves filled with
books and games that Googlers have brought in from home and based
on, Wilkinson says, “the idea of the village library as the repository
of thought.” On either end of the floor is a structure that looks
like a cross between a tree house and a guard tower, used for meetings
and offices. In the center atrium, overlooking the grand staircase,
is a group of larger, more luxurious meeting rooms. Other small meeting
rooms take the shape of yurts — another Wilkinson creation —
which look like little padded igloos and are easily assembled or torn
down.
The solution de resistance, though, is the
glass tents. Page and Brin knew their engineers needed quiet to
concentrate on programming, yet the company was also dedicated to
packing three or four people into an office, a configuration that
the cofounders liked from their Stanford grad-school days. They
wanted to achieve that without resorting to an impersonal warren
of cubicles or a hierarchical system of corner offices, which would
have belied their mostly flat management structure. Despite the
priority on concentration, face time is valued, along with the sort
of serendipitous encounters that might stimulate new ideas between
engineers not working closely together.
Page and Brin are also fanatical about air
quality and preservation of natural daylighting but insisted on
having offices alongside almost all of the windows. Wilkinson's
group designed an ingenious system of tented glass offices that
allows daylight to stream through the window-side offices and into
the center of the floor while preserving acoustic integrity. The
white canopies are made of an acrylic-coated polyester, quilted
together with polyester-fiber fill. They help reflect light into
the rest of the office and are topped by a neat unobtrusive unit
that contains lighting, HVAC, sprinklers, and an air diffuser. At
intervals panels of glass are glazed in color combos that identify
each office neighborhood.
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| Photo: Benny Chan/Fotoworks |
“In the beginning there was a lot
of open office,” site architect Ruben Smudde says. “By the
end it was a lot of closed office.” In its early years Google
was an unusually open company. The algorithms behind its search engine
were published as an academic paper, the entire fledgling company
was a Stanford engineering department PhD project, and Page and Brin
— dubbed the “Google guys” — always spoke freely
to journalists. But after a few questionable moves — including
an interview with Playboy given during the SEC's mandated pre-IPO
“quiet period” — the company began to close ranks while
still trying to maintain a veneer of openness. “Don't Be Evil”
is Google's informal motto, but a recent spate of Evil Empire&-style
moves — caving in to the Chinese government's demands that they
censor certain Web sites, enabling ads that seemed to “read”
your Gmail, placing long-term “cookies” on your hard drive
that retain information on your searches — have made its longtime
supporters wary and has drawn so much bad press that Google can seem
almost paranoid in its interactions with the outside world. Yet sometimes
they're unexpectedly candid. In a recent interview with Time, CEO
Eric Schmidt said, “We try very hard to look like we're out of
control. But in fact the company is very measured. And that's part
of our secret.”
That mix of openness and control is reflected
in the Google campus, a dichotomy that Wilkinson's team was quick
to intuit. “As we learned more about the company and realized
that this building was mostly for engineers, we knew we wanted to
do a very clear, clean space without it being labeled as a tech
space — not something that's all metal, for example. We were
creating a framework for everyone to make their own space,”
Smudde says. The framework would be meticulously designed, and the
engineers would provide the veneer of beautiful chaos. “What
was brilliant about Clive's design is that it's a bright white,
light space that becomes almost a neutral background for all the
stuff they were going to throw at it,” Laing says. “If
you'd designed a space that tried to be Googley, it would have been
too much.”
When the engineers first moved in, there was
some debate over whether the space had actually achieved Googleyness.
“At first some of them hated the space,” Wilkinson says.
But that was because, Laing says, “people didn't fill it up
right away, and it felt a bit empty and unevolved. Google likes
the buzz and the crowdedness. They love the intense interaction
that happens when people are in the same space. It's not a very
mature company — and I mean this in the best of ways —
where people are off doing their own things.” Now the space
is full — the bookshelves are crowded and each office bursts
with extras. If the Googleplex exploded, the employees would have
a hard time digging themselves out of a shower of pirate flags,
action figures, T-shirts with funny sayings, leis, ironic signs,
a fringed leather vest, thousands of game pieces, and giant Lego
people. Much of it was acquired when the company launched a contest
for the best office soon after moving in. Each group was given a
small budget, and thematic frivolity ensued.
Anderson's office, of course, took one of
the top prizes. In many ways he is Google's ur-engineer. His desk
merits a stop on the office tour. He is the first (and only) employee
suggested as a potential interviewee. He embodies all of the traits
that Page and Brin see in themselves: positive and supersmart, with
a PhD from a top school and the conviction that Google is changing
the world for the better. The early dictum of the Web was that all
information wants to be free. It is a utopian vision of the Internet
that many engineers still hold onto with a fervent college student
sort of idealism. Google may not be able to keep information entirely
free, but it can still try to create a workplace utopia — a
world beyond worlds where everyone is smart, and invention and necessity
coexist. The impulse is both beautiful and endlessly arrogant, an
adolescent's willful dream. Any utopia in the end is a form of benevolent
dictatorship. Though the cofounders wanted an office that encouraged
a work-life balance, it can be argued that this is just a twenty-first-century
version of the company town, where work and life become hopelessly
intertwined. But Google the company is being forced into maturity
— by the IPO, by the fact that Web pages that don't appear
on Google might as well not exist, and by its sheer size, power,
and influence. Hiring DEGW and Wilkinson was the act of a company
toying with the idea of growing up. Deciding, as Google did, to
complete just this one building rather than implementing the campus-wide
master plan that they originally asked for was a decision to grow
up on its own terms. For Google it's another in a long line of rebellions
that just might work.
Click to view the slide show: Google:
13 Ways to Collaborate.
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