Following their collaboration to design Google’s new campus in California, Heatherwick Studio and BIG were commissioned to create the company’s new headquarters in London. The team’s focus was not just to make special large workspaces but to find an architectural language that could fit into the local community of King’s Cross and an intense urban context.

The design presents a bold volume 330 meters long with interiors cascading across multiple floors, in a continuous space conducive to collaboration among workers. In tune with the other projects developed with Heatherwick Studio for Google, it proposes a flexible interior layout that can be adapted in the future to new ways of organizing work. For a company whose fame comes from a virtual world of data, this project represents an engagement with public physical world in a new way. The building will have retail spaces at ground level that will be instrumental in integrating it into the functional fabric of the city at large. Externally the panoramic sculpted roof garden will give unprecedented views to the city around and at the ground the street will come alive in unexpected ways.