Employees have started moving into Facebook’s new headquarters, a 435,555-sf building in Menlo Park, Calif., whose famed architect Frank Gehry describes as “unassuming, matter-of-fact, and cost effective.”
Gehry says he and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, had been working on this project for more than three years. The building sits on 22 acres within Facebook’s complex, the former campus of Sun Microsystems that the social media giant acquired in February 2011. The new headquarters is the 20th building to be constructed on that campus, hence its nickname MK20.
Level 10 was the General Contractor on this project, whose cost has not been disclosed by Facebook.
The headquarters features what Zuckerberg, on his own Facebook page, says is “the largest open floor plan in the world, a single room that fits thousands of people.” Winding staircases lead between floors. Zuckerberg says that the interior design “is pretty simple, it isn’t fancy. That’s on purpose.” About 2,800 of Facebook’s engineers will work in this building.
Glass-enclosed meeting rooms are situated in the center of this open space. One of the meeting rooms has been compared to a ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese or a McDonald’s playground. Indeed, there’s more than a little playfulness in the brightly colored furniture and walls throughout (including a glaringly orange hallway).
Facebook also hired Bay Area artists to design art installations for the building, which include an undulating mosaic wall and lots of dripping paint.
While it hasn’t released official photos of the headquarters, Facebook let Instagrammers with larger follower counts roam the building and photograph what they thought looked interesting or cool.
The building dips and rises from 45 to 73 feet. One of its attractions is a nine-acre rooftop park, designed by CMG Landscape Architecture, which includes a half-mile looping walking path. More than 400 trees were planted on what Wired magazine calls “a garden-roofed fantasyland.” The insulated roof also contributed to this building earning LEED Gold certification.
The exterior is sheathed in hyper-reflective siding, which is something of a Gehry trademark. But Facebook chose fritted window panes because the lines or patterns embedded in the glass are more visible, and, therefore, safer for birds that otherwise might fly into the windows.
Construction started on this building in early 2013. Among the concessions that Facebook made to get municipal approval include agreeing to build 15 low-cost homes or contribute $4.5 million toward affordable housing. It also agreed to restrict the number of vehicles that enter and leave the campus.
Facebook is creating a $500,000 charitable foundation and setting up a local job-training program. It is also cleaning up soil contaminated with toxic chemicals.
Related Stories
| May 13, 2014
19 industry groups team to promote resilient planning and building materials
The industry associations, with more than 700,000 members generating almost $1 trillion in GDP, have issued a joint statement on resilience, pushing design and building solutions for disaster mitigation.
| May 11, 2014
Final call for entries: 2014 Giants 300 survey
BD+C's 2014 Giants 300 survey forms are due Wednesday, May 21. Survey results will be published in our July 2014 issue. The annual Giants 300 Report ranks the top AEC firms in commercial construction, by revenue.
| May 1, 2014
Chinese spec 'world's fastest' elevators for supertall project
Hitachi Elevator Co. will build and install 95 elevators—including two that the manufacturer labels as the "world's fastest"—for the Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed Guangzhou CTF Finance Center.
| Apr 30, 2014
Visiting Beijing's massive Chaoyang Park Plaza will be like 'moving through a urban forest'
Construction work has begun on the 120,000-sm mixed-use development, which was envisioned by MAD architects as a modern, urban forest.
| Apr 29, 2014
Best of Canada: 12 projects nab nation's top architectural prize [slideshow]
The conversion of a Mies van der Rohe-designed gas station and North Vancouver City Hall are among the recently completed projects to win the 2014 Governor General's Medal in Architecture.
| Apr 29, 2014
USGBC launches real-time green building data dashboard
The online data visualization resource highlights green building data for each state and Washington, D.C.
| Apr 18, 2014
First international buildings among 700-plus certified by BOMA 360 Performance Program
In the first quarter of 2014, the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International certified 66 properties in the BOMA 360 Performance Program for commercial real estate markets across the U.S and, for the first time, abroad.
| Apr 16, 2014
Upgrading windows: repair, refurbish, or retrofit [AIA course]
Building Teams must focus on a number of key decisions in order to arrive at the optimal solution: repair the windows in place, remove and refurbish them, or opt for full replacement.
| Apr 15, 2014
12 award-winning structural steel buildings
Zaha Hadid's Broad Art Museum and One World Trade Center are among the projects honored by the American Institute of Steel Construction for excellence in structural steel design.
| Apr 15, 2014
Chipperfield's sparkling brass-clad scheme selected to be new home of Nobel Prize
The distinctive building, with its shimmering vertical brass elements and glass façade design, beat out two other finalists in the Nobel Center architectural competition.