Google has opened its first Experience visitor center on the West Coast, located next to its headquarters in Mountain View.
Mark Wickens
Google is opening part of its main campus to the general public starting this week.
The company opened its doors to its so-called “Visitor Experience” center to the public on Thursday following a ceremony that brought together Google executives and local leaders to hear from its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
“We have always focused on the experiences of Googlers and their friends,” said Google real estate chief Scott Foster. “But this project was intentionally designed for the general public.”
Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer of Google, was also in attendance and helped cut the ribbon on the premises.
Google’s new Mountain View Visitor Experience Center features a Google Store.
Although the public cannot enter Google’s actual office space, the new visitor center has a room where a community group or nonprofit organization can request to reserve the space for meetings or events. It also includes a café and a Google retail store, coming two years after the first public Google retail store opened in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The center’s cafe offers dishes such as sandwiches, soups and desserts from local restaurants. It’s Google’s first cafe open to the public, but offers fewer selections than a typical large campus cafeteria. It also features an outdoor “plaza” for events, as well as a small craft area and a small local shop that will feature rotating local retailers.
Google’s new visitor center features a room where a community group or nonprofit organization can request to reserve the space for meetings or events.
Mark Wickens
Executives said the center, which has been in the works for several years, comes at a time when technology is rapidly evolving and there is a need for more in-person space following the pandemic.
“Innovation is moving so quickly that having a place to gather is even more important,” Michelle Kaufmann, director of research and design on campus, told CNBC, referring to artificial intelligence and cloud computing. “It’s a step towards no longer being an ivory tower and hopefully it can be a blueprint for how the community can be more involved.”
Google’s new visitor experience includes an outdoor event space for the public.
This comes amid a trend of Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook (now Meta) and Google moving away from the traditional style of campus design that has historically been insulated from the general public. The trend comes as companies are under pressure to appease both top talent and their non-technical neighbors.
Facebook has revised its plans for the large Menlo Park campus, introducing a similar model that would include affordable housing, a full-service grocery store and a pharmacy, among other things.
Google won approval for plans for an even larger, 80-acre mixed-use campus 10 miles away in downtown San Jose that would house 25,000 employees. Executives insisted they remained committed to the long-term implementation of a project in the area after CNBC found that project plans were halted after the first phase of demolition due to economic concerns and cost cutting this year.
Google executives and local government officials gathered Wednesday for the opening of the company’s new visitor center.
Mark Wickens