You can ride your bike to your desk in Google’s new offices (Picture: BIG /Heatherwick Studio)

Think your office is all modern with its glass meeting rooms (complete with ‘wacky’ names on the doors/walls) and mismatched furniture in the ‘breakout areas’?

Well, it’s time to sack the office manager.

Because Google has unveiled the plans for its new ‘Google campus’ in North Bayshore, California, and it has actual artificial skies.

The proposal for the new Googleplex was submitted by European architectural firms of Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studio to the local planning department in February, and it also does away with traditional doors, stairs, roofs and walls.


There are no stairs – the floors just slope upwards (Picture: BIG/Heatherwick Studio)

First up, there’s those artificial skies – four giant glass canopies which allow the company to create its own microclimate (yes, it’s always summer in Google world).



The floor, meanwhile, is made up of giant plates, gently sloping upwards like a series of ramps, so the 10,000 members of staff don’t need to use the stairs to move from one level to another.

According to Bloomberg, Google will have the ability to add extra meeting spaces as they go, using stackable, modular rooms.

‘Google says it will invent a kind of portable crane-robot, which it calls crabots, that will reconfigure these boxes and roam the premises like the droids in Star Wars,’ the site explains.

You’ll never want to leave, which we suspect is the point (Picture: BIG/Heatherwick Studio)

Staff will be able to ride their bikes straight to their desks, thanks to the cycle lanes running around the building, and exercise and yoga classes will be held on the balcony on the top floor.

The architects’ drawings helpfully show people doing the downward dog on a small platform at the top of the building, with no barrier to stop them plummeting to their death. But, as Bloomberg points out, presumably Google can control the earth’s gravitational pull as well.

With a campus that also includes acres of manicured parks, hiking and bike trails, restored coastal wetlands, shops, cafes and 5,000 units of proposed housing, there’s really no reason for employees to ever leave.

Check out the sloping floors (Picture: BIG/Heatherwick Studio)

Which *narrows eyes* may actually be the point.

Maybe your standard open-plan office isn’t so bad after all.

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