MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Pulling out a trump card it was sitting on for years, Google has found another way to construct the canopied, utopian campus that caught the world’s attention earlier this year.
The search engine giant on Friday filed plans at Mountain View City Hall for a translucent domed building that would rise several stories near the company’s current headquarters.
Even as Google earlier this month suffered what its real estate chief described as a “significant blow” when the Mountain View City Council rejected most of its ambitious campus expansion, the company’s hidden political calculus included holding yet another plan in the wings.
Forced to choose between multiple developers vying for a limited amount of space, the city on May 5 gave most of the available square footage to LinkedIn, allowing Google to proceed with only one of the four sites where it had proposed to build a vast network of tent-like structures linked by greenways.
But Google already had building rights for a fifth site overlooking a park just east of the current Googleplex, after presenting the city with office plans for the property nearly a decade ago. The city owns the vacant property and leases it to Google. The lease agreement allows Google to build up to 595,000 square feet of office and commercial space there.
The original architecture plans were later scrapped, but Google’s entitlement to the property is still grandfathered in from before the city set strict limits on office expansion in the business district that is home to Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Intuit and other tech firms.
“For years, there’ve been talks of building on that site,” said Martin Alkire, a city planner who was still reviewing the details of the document that Google dropped off on Friday morning.
The plans feature the same futuristic designs by European architects Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick that were part of the larger plan debated by the city this year.
