Vanity Fair today released a brand new architectural rendering of the plans for Google’s new office building complex, called ‘Bay View.’ The new campus, planned for Mountain View, near San Francisco Bay, comes after the recently aborted Googleplex plans fell through, and will have nine different structures, each four stories high, shaped like bent rectangles. These shapes are arranged to form different-sized courtyards, while several of the buildings seem to have green roofs, perhaps planned as rooftop gardens, cafes, and possibly meeting spaces. There are bridges connecting all the separate buildings, and there are no cars to be found within the rendered plan.

Google has hired Seattle-based architectural firm NBBJ, known for its more conventional approach to design; the rendered plans do show a similarity to other buildings and complexes that Google already owns, points out Vanity Fair. Google gathered a ton of data about how its employees work, what kind of spaces they might want or need, how close different working groups needed to be to each other, and a host of other information to inform the architects during the planning phases of the project.

This aggregation of data has produced an office complex that is very similar to current Google office buildings, which makes a sort of sense. The older buildings have a mix of private and communal workspaces, cafes, a casual and whimsical approach to interior design, and have a variety of eco-friendly green features. The new plans have all of the same, only more so, and perhaps more directly customized to the Google corporate ethos than the previous buildings have, due to their having been retrofitted, rather than built from scratch.

The floor plan allows for everyone in the 1.1 million-square-foot office complex to be as close as a couple minute walk from anyone else, echoing Google’s hope to create opportunities for employees to meet, have ideas, and collaborate without restriction. “You can’t schedule innovation,” David Radcliffe, a civil engineer who manages the company’s real estate, told Vanity Fair. “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?’”

• SourceVanity Fair
• ViaEngadget