![]() I've looked at a YouTube tour of Googleplex. This 2006 picture shows a Google employee getting a haircut at a salon on the Googleplex campus. This sort of strategy made more sense, of course, in Silicon Valley itself, where no one can really walk down the road to a coffee shop or anything like that because it's really a suburban campus.īut when you translate that model into inner-cities like San Francisco or New York City, it has a sort of a negative impact on the locations where the campuses are based. A very large potential population of customers are not really available because they're being given everything within their campus. If you create a condition where your workers don't need to leave their workplace, that means that commerce in the immediate area, street commerce, is really fundamentally kind of constrained. Because whereas many of the staff really appreciate that, there are a lot of knock-on effects that are not really good for necessarily the workers or the local communities. The model that Google probably initiated and has been adopted by a lot of the very large tech companies of wraparound amenities for staff has been a mixed blessing, obviously. Here is part of Wilkinson's conversation with As It Happens host Carol Off.Ĭlive, you have recently called aspects of Googleplex "dangerous" and "fundamentally unhealthy." How so? "Our office environments are designed to improve productivity, collaboration and well-being, and we're continuously improving upon our workplace concepts based on employee feedback." "We've long believed that being together in our offices to collaborate and build community is core to our culture, which will remain just as important to Google's future as we move towards a hybrid work environment," Google Canada spokesperson Molly Morgan told As It Happens in an emailed statement. Still, it says it's redesigning its workplaces in light of the pandemic shift to remote work. Google is is currently planning two new massive mixed-use campuses in California, both of which will include housing, retail and outdoor space. He says it disrupts work-life balance and prevents communities from reaping the benefits of a growing population of tech workers. But in a recent interview with NPR, Wilkinson expressed misgivings about the work campus trend. Since Wilkinson's original design was completed in 2005, the campus has expanded and become a model for workplaces across the tech sector. The 190,000-square metre facility is more of a campus than an office, featuring all the amenities a person needs, including laundry, recreational facilities and restaurants. The man who designed Google's sprawling corporate headquarters says that style of massive work campus is bad for workers and communities.Ĭlive Wilkinson, of Clive Wilkinson Architects, helped design Googleplex, the headquarters for Google and its parent company Alphabet, in Mountain View, Calif.
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