Google opens Mountain View visitor center at dragonscale canopy office

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Google hopes its new Mountain View visitor center will create dynamic spaces for neighbors, tourists, artists and employees to gather, create and innovate.

The Google Visitor Experience, nestled inside the company’s eye-catching Gradient Canopy office building at 2000 North Shoreline Blvd., was slated to open to the public Thursday and includes a Google store that marks the tech titan’s first brick-and-mortar retail outlet on the West Coast.

Along with the Google store, the company’s visitor experience center includes pop-up retail sites, art-making stations, a public cafe, open spaces and unique works of art that include a bear made of 160,000 pennies, a walk-through globe and a sculpture that disappears depending on the viewing angle. A series of community events are also planned.

“We wanted to design something that is really special,” Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet, which owns Google, said Wednesday during an event to provide a sneak peek inside the new visitor center.

The complex is poised to be more than a visitor center, Google executives say.

“We have included spaces that we specifically designed for the community,” Porat said.

With coronavirus-linked business shutdowns a thing of the past and most people no longer isolating, Google hopes its new center can help spur an array of connections involving the public and employees working in the Gradient Canopy building as well as other company sites.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Michelle Kaufmann, Google’s director of R&D for the built environment. “We started working on this eight years ago.”

The company’s store was crafted to invite the public to stroll about and experience Google’s latest gadgets.

The gear includes cutting-edge devices such as the Pixel 8 phone and whimsical items like miniature versions of Google’s grab-and-go bicycles, called GBikes in the company’s terminology.

Other key sections of the visitor center include the Huddle, a platform for community connections that will offer free events and workshops for visitors, the Pop-Up Shop, which creates opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and the Cafe @ Mountain View, Google’s first-ever public dining experience. Google prepares 1.5 million meals a week, spread over 60 countries, according to Matt Hood, Google’s food program senior director.

“This can become your everyday local breakfast shop or a place for people to grab lunch,” Hood said.

The visitor center and plazas are part of the company’s Gradient Canopy office, one of three Google buildings in Mountain View that employ dragonscale solar panels to provide energy to power the trio of futuristic work hubs.

The canopy office building is the largest building in the world to receive a Living Building Challenge Materials Petal Certification, according to Kaufmann, which is one of the most ambitious green certifications that a building can achieve.

In addition to the solar panels, sections of the Gradient Canopy office building use re-purposed materials including some salvaged from the historic Hangar One a few miles away, Kaufmann said.

The building was designed and built to weave together futuristic features that help the vast complex blend with the local ecosystem and environment. The Burning Man Project helped to curate the art pieces on the campus.

“Google did an amazing job with this building,” said Shani Kleinhaus, an environmental advocate with the Santa Clara Valley Audobon Society. “They are bringing nature home with this. They are bringing the ecosystem into the building.”

The store is a blend of the Renaissance period and the brand-new technologies Google crafts.

“We wanted to create a store that is like something from the 15th century, where you would have a room with shelves full of antiquities,” said Ivy Ross, Google’s vice president of Design, UX and research for hardware.

An array of phones and other devices are tucked away in the store’s nooks and shelves.

The new visitor center, as well as the Gradient Canopy building, are reminders that Google is attempting to increase the number of hours that employees spend at the company’s offices. Many Googlers could be spotted walking in and out of the building and other offices nearby, as well as riding the company’s bicycles.

About 1,800 Googlers are working in the Gradient Canopy building, estimated Scott Foster, Google’s vice president of Real Estate and Workplaces Services. The building can accommodate up to 2,000 workers. World-renowned architectural firms Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group teamed up to design the building and visitor center.

The Google Visitor Experience and its proximity to the new office building could influence connections not only at Google but also in the community generally.

“For the first time, we have a place that can be a blueprint for the best of coming together,” Kaufmann said.