Bay (architecture)

Transcription

(Bjarke) Silicon Valley has been the cradle of this series of innovations that over the last decades have propelled technology and world economy. But all of the resources, all of the intelligence, has been invested into the immaterial, the digital realm, the internet. It was just fascinating to be seeing the physical reality of a valley that has changed the world, and that valley actually itself hasn't changed. (David) Tech really hasn't adopted a particular language for buildings. I mean, we've just found old buildings, we've moved into them, and we've made do best we could. We have an opportunity to build new buildings, which is nothing unique, which people do every day, all over the world, but what we've tried to do is take a step back and say, "How do buildings work with nature?" You know, "What will transit look like in the future?" Not "What is transit today?" We're really making sure that we make spaces very open and accessible so it's just not for Googlers, but it's for anyone who lives in the area to come by. And then the last piece, which is really Google at its heart, in anything we do, trying to leave the project giving something back to the world, that they didn't have before we started. (David) We scoured the world, looking for a special architect, who could really do something different, who really listened and created stuff from the ground up. And we really got down to what we believed were the two best in class. You guys. [laughs] My name is Bjarke Ingels. I'm an architect and the founder of Bjarke Ingels Group, or simply BIG. (David) The BIG Studios, they're ambitious. They do a lot of very community-focused projects, and that was pretty compelling to us. Good actually. Good reaction, by the way. My name is Thomas Heatherwick. I'm the founder of Heatherwick Studio. (David) Thomas, on the other hand, has this attention to human scale and beauty that I haven't seen in anyone before. And you bring those two people together-- somebody who really thinks about function and form and you couple that with beauty, and you just have this team that does pretty amazing stuff. (Bjarke) When we met each other in Mountain View, we thought that it would be interesting to work with each other and Google, to maybe come up with something that would be much more creative than anything we could have come up with ourselves. (Thomas) What is the best possible environment we can make to invent, engineer, and most importantly, make ideas happen and go out into the world? - It's cool. - It's cool. (Thomas) When you visit the Google campus, there's lots of trees. But there's this constant, major undermining of that by the road system and the infrastructure required for all of those cars. And it just feels like trees are, like, street furniture. (Bjarke) And everything has turned into parking lots. We're trying to sort of reverse this process, and really sort of recreate some of the natural qualities that have been there in the first place, really transform the sea of parking that you find today into a--sort of a natural landscape, where you'll find an abundance of green both outside, but also inside. (Thomas) These are greenhouses that enclose and protect pieces of nature. (David) Next to ecologically-sensitive areas we're able to pull back buildings and create wildlife habitat. We're able to create areas where we're restoring waterways that bring water out to the bay. It's interesting to try and look at how you can really augment or turn the dial up more on that nature, at the same time as looking to really protect the land use. (Bjarke) Google's presence in Mountain View is simply so strong that it can't be a fortress that shuts away nature, that shuts away the neighbors. It really needs to become a neighborhood in Mountain View. (Thomas) A motivator for the work we're doing now is to be generous. You can provide facilities that can be shared with people who don't work for an organization, and keep an organization's feet on the ground. (David) The buildings themselves allow both the public as well as employees to move through them. We wanted to make sure that we created communities where bikes and pedestrians felt like they didn't have to worry about cars zipping by at 70 miles an hour. (Thomas) Part of our work is to try to find ways to make places that you would go and have a conversation and go for a walk with great pleasure, and choose in a weekend to be. (Bjarke) So in that sense, our idea for the Google campus is really to give it the diversity, the liveliness that you find in an urban neighborhood so that a lot of the traditional distinctions in an urban setting or in an office environment will have evaporated or at least been blurred significantly. (David) How will we work five years from now? How will we work 15 or 20 years from now? We don't know what it's going to be, but we know that it just needs to be this incredibly flexible space for it to work. (Bjarke) In nature, things aren't over-programmed or over-prescribed. And in a way, if our cities or our work environments could have more of this flexibility or openness for interpretation, they would become more stimulating and more creative environments to live and work in. In a traditional building, reconfiguring from office space to automotive to bio-tech would take months and years, and you would knock those buildings down, and then, 5 or 10 years later, you'd do it again. (Thomas) The desire, really, is to try to create pieces of environment you can work in, in multiple ways. (Bjarke) Suddenly, within this, the architecture of the building becomes almost like giant pieces of furniture that can be connected in different ways. It's almost like the Lincoln Logs when we were kids. You can just pile them up and assemble them differently, with basically no new materials. (Thomas) It's a sort of structure of looking, in a way, at the historic city model of making streets, and then this is not the historic model of making environments that bring together and protect those streets. (Bjarke) Instead of having buildings as these, like, boxes with walls and floors, dissolve the building into a simple, super-transparent, ultra-light membrane... (Thomas) Creating, in effect, a piece of glass fabric, and draping it across some tent poles, and we're blurring the outside world and the inside world. (David) We're really thinking about how do we create buildings that draw less energy? How do we create buildings that use less water than a traditional building? And all of this science and know-how is going into this project. (Bjarke) We will keep developing, we'll keep researching, in terms of materials or technologies. The architecture will evolve, as times evolve. (Thomas) There are ways that we can try and make space that isn't just for the next 5 or 10 years, but for many decades to come. (Bjarke) Between these three different minds, or three different companies working together, I think we have really arrived at something that I'm dead certain we wouldn't have arrived at if any one of us were, like, working in isolation. (Thomas) We have a duty to reflect, in the physical environment, the values that have been manifested in the innovations that have come out from this part of California. A humanistic spirit is something that--it feels really important to embody in what we build, and so that's shared between all of us, and is exciting and driving us and will be, in its way, revolutionary.