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Google on Friday submitted a proposal to raze parts of its Mountain View campus and replace it with a series of airy, space-age buildings with translucent roofs and modular interiors that can be moved around and reconfigured like Lego bricks.



The campus plan, designed by Heatherwick Studio of London and the Bjarke Ingels Group of Denmark, is more than architectural eye candy. If built, it would completely overhaul the sleepy North Bayshore neighborhood that surrounds Google’s headquarters. It is, however, just a proposal, one of several that were submitted to Mountain View’s planning department as part of a long-running redevelopment effort.

North Bayshore is a sprawling expanse of low-slung office buildings surrounded by acres of parking. Google’s proposal would add bike trails, bridges and retail space. Assuming Mountain View’s City Council allowed developers to build new housing units — something that members of the city’s incoming council have been pushing for — it would turn the area around Google into a kind of second downtown.

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Google owns or leases about 7.3 million square feet of office space in Mountain View, according to Transwestern, a commercial real estate brokerage. Today, its patchwork campus is spread across mismatched buildings throughout the city. At the lunch hour, it looks a bit like a high school campus, with packs of employees crossing busy streets on their way to company cafeterias or riding along the road on multicolored bikes.

To build the new headquarters, for which Google would act as its own developer, the company would tear down many of the buildings it currently occupies and replace them with newer, taller structures. It would also tie four disconnected sites together while adding 2.5 million square feet, or about as much office space as there is in the Empire State Building.

Each building will have several glass enclosures that can be moved around “like furniture,” Google says.

“Instead of constructing immoveable concrete buildings, we’ll create lightweight block-like structures which can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas,” the company said in a blog post. “Large translucent canopies will cover each site, controlling the climate inside yet letting in light and air. With trees, landscaping, cafes and bike paths weaving through these structures, we aim to blur the distinction between our buildings and nature.”

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It includes lots of underground parking and 40,000 square feet of retail and arts space. The proposal also has 11 miles of bike trails, including a bridge over Highway 101 that separates North Bayshore area from the rest of Mountain View. This would make it easier for Google’s local employees to bike to work.

Urban planners have noted that Mountain View’s traffic problems have been exacerbated because much of the city’s job growth has been in North Bayshore, but most of its housing stock and transportation services, such as a station for the CalTrain commuter rail line, are miles away and on the other side of 101. Thus, even local employees have almost no choice but to drive.

One big issue is still outstanding: Google’s proposal does not include new housing for the area, but company executives have said on several occasions that they want to add housing near their campus.

That idea was repeatedly shot down by Mountain View’s outgoing City Council, but in the November elections the city added three pro-housing candidates to the seven-member body. One new member, Leonard M. Siegel, has said he wants at least 5,000 higher-density housing units around North Bayshore.

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