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Google’s New London Headquarters: Possibly the Ugliest Building in the World

Google has released designs for a new 11-story, 1 million-square-foot headquarters in London near King’s Cross railway station, complete with a sprawling, landscaped rooftop garden. It features a mashup of styles, including Roman columns, and a “Star Wars meets Frank Lloyd Wright on the Love Boat” style that is simply an abomination.

This may just be the ugliest building ever designed.

 

The facilities will include a cafe, gym and pool as well as a rooftop track and ground-floor retail spaces, according to the company’s application for permission to build.
The campus has been designed by an all-star team that includes Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer behind London’s 2012 Olympic cauldron, and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’ BIG firm. The two are also collaborating on Google’s Mountain View campus in California.

According to Architect’s Journal, the entire complex will cost some £1 billion. The main 11-story building will provide some 80,819 square meters of space and stretch across 330 meters of ground, sitting on a “plinth” of shops with ground-floor entrances to the offices interspersed between them. This is intended to create a “varied and open ground plane that can change with time,” according to the submitted plans.

In a statement, designer Thomas Heatherwick said he’d been inspired by the site of the new office, which functions as a hub for much of the city’s transport links.

“The area is a fascinating collision of diverse building types and spaces and I can’t help but love this mix of massive railway stations, roads, canals and other infrastructure all layered up into the most connected point in London,” said Heatherwick. “Influenced by these surroundings, we have treated this new building for Google like a piece of infrastructure too, made from a family of interchangeable elements which ensure that the building and its workspace will stay flexible for years to come.”

Google had submitted designs for a new headquarters in 2013, but they were later scrapped. If the new application is approved by Camden Council, construction will start next year.
Anything goes, it seems, in a world of computer-aided design, high-tech materials, pre-fabrication, high land values, the unblushing egos of developers and the seemingly insatiable aspiration of corporations with spare millions to lavish on state-of-the-art offices.