Googlers can finally breathe a sigh of relief, now that the company’s new campus in Mountain View California has finally officially been given the green light to move forward. The decision represents a big step for the company, as it has been trying to gain the approval since at least May of 2015 and had some hurdles in obtaining the property. The website for the city states that approval was given on March 7, 2017. Work is expected to start on the project sometime in April and will be constructed in the “North Bayshore Precise plan Area,” as previously reported. It is expected, according to the agreement reached by Mountain View and the search giant, to take around 2 years to reach completion. More details about work on the two-story, nearly 600,000 square foot, office building and surrounding complex will be put up on the city’s website as they become available.
Unfortunately, the only further information that can be surmised at this point comes from the project plans themselves. Perhaps the best way to envision the new campus – while everybody is waiting to see if Google can actually meet its ambitious plans – is to imagine it as a more publicly open extension of the Googleplex that currently exists right next door to its building site. Google plans to have publicly accessible shopping, park-like areas, and more on the lower level and in the area surrounding the complex – including a continuation of the Googleplex’s green loop. The upper level will be filled with reconfigurable office spaces and not open to the public. The tent-inspired building itself is set to feature an architecture that makes it eco-friendly, energy and temperature efficient, and genuinely aesthetically pleasing.
The expected start date is also about a month before Google’s I/O 2017 is set to start – on May 17. So it is possible that attendees to the developer-focused festivities will be getting some of the first looks at the campus. Anybody who is still curious about what exactly the search giant has in mind for the newest add-on to its campus can look through the in-depth plans, which are still currently available from the Mountain View website and will likely remain there until much closer to project completion.