Google Space

Sim Van der Ryn’s Design for an Empathic World is a brief for person-centered design, design that takes the users and the world around a building into account.

Van der Ryn sees “forward-thinking companies” doing just what he suggests. He quotes Paul Goldberger on Google’s California campus: “What is really striking about this project . . . isn’t what the architecture will look like. . . . It’s the way in which Google decided what it wanted and how it conveyed this to its architects. Google is . . . the most voracious accumulator of data on the planet. When it decided to build a building, it did what it did best, which was to gather data.”

From that data, Google concluded that the most effective way to achieve their aims was to design a building of bent rectangles and a “floor plan that would maximize ‘casual collisions of the work force.’ No employee in the 1.1-million-square-foot complex will be more than a two-and-a-half minute walk from any other.” The building puts more emphasis on the experience of the workers than on the shape of the building.The result, engineer David Radcliffe says, is a sign that works from the inside out” (45).

In the following chapter, he writes about designing buildings that fit their natural environment, so that the building teaches something about the “sacred” natural realities of light, water, soil, and air. Buildings shouldn’t reinforce a “geography of nowhere,” but fit into the specific places where they are set, working with rather than against the natural contours. But the way Van der Ryn puts this is curious: “Move away from a totally human-centered view of the world,” he counsels (68).

The reader is left a little bewildered: Is a building designed for its users or not?