Google Shifts Real Estate Strategy to Adaptive Reuse

For years, tech giants have been building massive, new design-y headquarters, writes Nate Berg in Fast Company. “Increasingly though, Google is going a different route. Instead of solely building modern, amenity-rich campuses, the tech giant is putting more of its now-global real estate dollars into adaptively reusing old, significant, and interesting structures.”

In Los Angeles, an airplane hangar originally built by Howard Hughes for the construction of the Spruce Goose was bought by Google in the 2010s and converted into a 450,000-square-foot office complex. “Another project in Sunnyvale, California, is adapting a more recent piece of historic industrial architecture, turning a 1960s-era research and development facility of one of the first mainframe-computer makers into a 250,000-square-foot office building.”

“All this reuse is an office real estate strategy that makes a lot of sense in the hybrid work era coming out of the pandemic.” As Berg explains, “Bakker says making older buildings more energy efficient plays into Google’s sustainability goals, while also bolstering its environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) values. Doing so with very visible buildings and neighborhood projects becomes a form of marketing all on its own.”