Name: Inside Google’s $2.1 Billion Office in a Transformed Freight Terminal
Uploaded: 2024-07-26T04:00:00Z
Duration: 8 min 51 s
Description: Google’s original Silicon Valley headquarters featured ping pong tables and nap pods. Its newest office in New York offers a peek into Google’s changing culture and its vision for the future of work.

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Google’s original Silicon Valley headquarters featured ping pong tables and nap pods. Its newest office in New York offers a peek into Google’s changing culture and its vision for the future of work. Photo: Joe Dibble

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Google’s original Silicon Valley headquarters featured ping pong tables and nap pods. Its newest office in New York offers a peek into Google’s changing culture and its vision for the future of work.

Inside Google’s $2.1 Billion Office in a Transformed Freight Terminal

Google's newest office is actually almost 100 years old. It was built inside and on top of an old rail terminal, but step inside this one-million-plus-square-foot space and you'll see Google's latest thinking on the workplace, which is flexible and changeable. No one's gonna get mad at me. I can have the desk however I want?

That's right.

It should be about solving for tomorrow. Things that we can't even anticipate.

Google's St. John's Terminal was designed for, well, working mostly. That means, unlike it's Silicon Valley office, there aren't any tables for this. No ping-pong in this? I mean, I brought my own paddles. We took a tour with the project's leads to get a closer look. St. John's Terminal is part of Google's growing campus on the West Side of Manhattan. The company paid $2.1 billion for the building, which was built in 1934 as a freight train terminal.

Trains used to come from upstate and bring food, provisions. It would come into the building in the railbeds.

Reporter: Railbeds that you can see here where the Google logo now sits. The tracks stretched up to what is now the High Line, a public park on the West Side of Manhattan.

This is the one place in all of New York where I really wanted to remove a portion of a building. The St. John's Terminal spanned over West Houston Street and made this dark tunnel. So the very first thought was to cut through the building, expose West Houston to the sky, and connect our neighborhood to our waterfront.

Reporter: Then to transform this into a workspace, CookFox added nine floors on top of the existing rail terminal.

In a city of skyscrapers, we wanted to develop a ground-scrapper.

So this building is longer than it is tall, even at 12 stories?

This building is way longer than it is tall. Yes.

Reporter: When St. John's Terminal was built, it had some of the largest floors in the city. At more than 100,000 square feet per floor, the terminal could hold 227 train cars altogether.

This space that we're standing in is actually larger than the hall inside Grand Central Terminal, to give you some perspective.

This space?

The footprint of this space, yes.

What is it about the building that makes it suitable for Google?

The large floor plates allow for a very flexible workplace. The heavy floor loading, the tall ceilings, the big windows, bringing natural light in. All of those things lend towards an excellent workplace of the future.

Reporter: One of the biggest differences in this office and Google's other US locations is who works here.

The building was built around the needs of our global business organization. These are business professionals.

So not engineers?

Not engineers.

Okay. So what do these teams need? Lots of places to meet their clients. Ice cream matcha.

Thank you.

The way that the furniture was selected was to encourage a more comfortable and relaxed posture. And then surrounding it, all of the components that you see, they're all just reinforcing this notion that everything is lightweight enough for you to take it in your own hands, pretty much.

I think it just lowers the temperature and the sense of intensity that often comes with business interactions. You can immediately grab a coffee and have your meeting.

For meetings that require more than coffee, Google built Share, a full-service restaurant for Googlers and their clients. Is it as hard to get a reservation here as it is in Soho?

It's a little easier here.

Okay. Of course, there are paces with actual desks and meeting rooms for Googlers. Here, those spaces are called neighborhoods, and each team has one of their own.

And that team decides how they wanna configure the neighborhood, the mix of fixed desks versus more informal workspaces, communal tables, those sorts of things.

Reporter: So it would be possible for me to move a desk?

Do you wanna move a desk?

I wanna move a desk.

Let's move a desk.

Let's move a desk.

That corner. And then we can--

Over here and then we're coming this way.

Just gonna rotate it that way, yeah.

Okay. All right. I can have the desk however I want?

That's right.

Reporter: Each neighborhood has its own dedicated meeting rooms. So Googlers don't have to fight for the rest of the building to book a space for a team meeting. And that's where the real modularity comes in.

They could say, "Our team that's working together, we're closer to units of four versus a unit of eight. So we'd like to have two meeting rooms instead of one."

So this space could be two meeting rooms instead of one?

Absolutely.

Reporter: Google's R&D team, Gensler, and the modular interior wall company, DIRTT, developed a custom demountable room system. So teams working on the main workspace boards can adjust their room size based on their needs. From an eight-person meeting room, to a pair of four-person team rooms, to a pair of two-person shared offices. Why is it important to create a space that is completely changeable?

Because business keeps changing. In order for us to keep the workplace desirable and essential, it needs to be moving with the pace of your business and enabling innovation, not holding it back.

Reporter: At St. John's Terminal, neighborhoods are only the half of it. Literally. Here, roughly equal floor space was given to shared workspaces, which include expansive work lounges on every floor, cafes, terraces, micro kitchens, and more. Even though these workspaces lack desks, they're still built for work. Why is it important to make every space a workspace?

Why not? In today's world, people are on the move and they have so many different needs and preferences for how they wanna work best throughout not only their work day, but their work week. And what we felt was that if we enabled the opportunity for somebody to find a space to work effectively, we should take it.

A lot of these spaces are designed to feel like libraries or coffee shops. As we've walked through this space and seen the kind of amenities that are offered here, it's hard not to notice that it feels maybe a bit more grown up.

When we were building this building, we wanted it to feel like New York, but we also wanted the sense of nature and connectivity and calm that often isn't associated with New York, because we know as human beings, that's what we need to be productive.

Reporter: To fulfill that connection to nature, the team put in about 1.5 acres of native plants on terraces here. When we were there, we saw a garage door kind of open up and welcome employees to the outdoor space on the top levels.

So sometimes this idea of biophilic design and connection to nature is very nuanced and subtle, and sometimes we like to be quite literal. So the garage doors on the north and south that could literally open up and connect you indoors and outdoors with nothing separating you, that was part of the design from day one.

Reporter: Of course, these gardens offer more than just plants. Even though St. John's Terminal is 12 floors, the open space around it allows clear views in all directions. It's hard not to notice your place in the city.

There are so many options for office buildings in the city, and we looked at so many before zeroing in on this particular building. It's incredibly special in the real estate footprint of the overall city.

One of the most important things is how this building is of New York. And many people have a bias thinking about tech companies from the West Coast having an introverted quality to them. And I believe St. John's Terminal is fundamentally different in that it's absolutely integrated and part of a neighborhood.

The addition of St. John's Terminal has made Google's New York operational footprint the second largest after its home base in Silicon Valley. Is Google just trying to take over the West Side?

No, not quite. I think we're done for a while.

What Google has tested here with modular design may be replicated in any of its future offices, but by then, St. John's Terminal could look quite different. So if you come back here in 10 years and things look different inside, but you're just here for lunch, that's success.

That's success.

Got it.

This space should patina in a way that none of us can predict, but is going to be the most beautiful outcome because the Googlers did it.

Offices are as unique as the companies they house. This WSJ series takes viewers inside standout spaces to show the amenities–and quirks–that separate them from the rest, as designers and company executives explain the reason behind it all.  

Inside Google’s $2.1 Billion Office in a Transformed Freight Terminal

Open Office

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