Whoever thought the coronavirus pandemic would drastically change tech companies’ real estate plans in Silicon Valley, hasn’t met Google.
The Alphabet company has proposed a new tech campus in its historic home city of Mountain View, with plans to remodel 40 acres into a mixed-use center that includes housing, retail and community gathering spaces in a town-like tech campus, the company said Tuesday.
The Middlefield Park Master Plan envisions a campus that includes up to 1.33 million square feet of office space, 30,000 square feet of retail-type use, up to 1,850 housing units, and 20,000 square feet of civic and event space, as well as 12 acres of open space.
America’s fractious and tragic response to the COVID-19 pandemic has made the nation look more like a failed state than like the richest country in world history. Doom-scrolling through morbid headlines in 2020, one could easily believe that we have lost our capacity for effective crisis response. And maybe we have. But a major crisis has a way of exposing what is broken and giving a new generation of leaders a chance to build something better. Sometimes the ramifications of their choices are wider than one might think.
The article talks about how New York and Chicago have bounced back from previous challenges.
“New York is built on disasters,” Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU, told me recently. “There’s the 1835 fire, and the construction of the Croton Aqueduct. There’s the 1888 blizzard, and the construction of the subway. There’s the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which killed 146 workers in Manhattan. Frances Perkins would say, ‘The New Deal started with the factory fire,’ because it was the disaster that led to a New York State commission on labor conditions, which in turn led to the eight-hour workday. In all of these physical disasters, New York City has responded by changing for the better.”
The Chicago fire enabled the rise of skyscrapers in three major ways. First, it made land available for new buildings. The fire may have destroyed the business district, but the railway system remained intact, creating ideal conditions for new construction. So much capital flowed into Chicago that downtown real-estate prices actually rose in the first 12 months after the fire. “The 1871 fire wiped out the rich business heart of the city, and so there was lots of money and motivation to rebuild immediately,” Julius L. Jones, an assistant curator at the Chicago History Museum, told me. “It might have been different if the fire had just wiped out poor areas and left the banks and business offices alone.” What’s more, he said, the city used the debris from the fire to extend the shoreline into Lake Michigan and create more land.
Selected from entries by 110 registered design teams, the winning design is Superbloom, a cluster of green pipes that rise to various heights before curving out to hold light fixtures and other elements. Able to be augmented with features like benches, electric vehicle charging stations, umbrellas, and solar panels, the design can morph into thousands of different heights and configurations depending on the specific place and its requirements.
Created by L.A.-based design collaborative Project Room, the streetlight is less a design than a system, according to lead designer Joakim Dahlqvist.
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