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Work on the first wholly owned and designed Google building outside the United States is making a visible impact in one of London's busiest neighbourhoods. The 11-storey Google headquarters in King's Cross, located next to the transit hub of the same name, is erupting into the local skyline as steel floors begin surrounding the concrete cores of the structure.
The new building, a textbook example of a 'groundscraper', will join the adjacent mid-rise at 6 Pancras Square and an additional building to create a combined King's Cross campus housing approximately 7,000 Google employees.
Boasting more than one million square feet of office space, the purpose-built development caters to employee well-being by offering an expansive slate of amenities, including a 300-metre-long landscaped roof deck and a fitness package with a swimming pool and multi-use games area.
Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group collaborated on the design of the building, which is informed by the area's vernacular architecture. Longer than The Shard is tall, the face of the building fronts a pedestrianized boulevard. To break up the massing and provide a more human-scaled public realm, two-storey retail pods of different configurations interact with passersby.
"Our design for the new Google place at King's Cross is rooted in the local character of the area, taking advantage of the contextually defined building envelope while creating continuously cascading work environments that will connect Googlers across multiple floors," said Bjarke Ingels, Founding Partner at Bjarke Ingels Group.
"By opening up the ground floor and activating the roofscape, the light and airy workspaces are sandwiched between the terraced gardens on the roof—and market halls, auditoria and shops on the ground."
SkyriseCities will be sure to return to this project as progress continues. For more information, check out the associated Database file and Forum thread, and as always, feel free to join the conversation in the comments section below.
