550 Washington Street: Siège social de Google NYC, New York (États-Unis)

Industry and grey matter

The Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States have been rivals for more than a century. As the birthplace of the tech giants, California seemed to have reestablished itself as the most appealing coast, leaving New York and the East Coast lagging far behind. But the Big Apple has assets and resources that it has decided to harness in order to attract the Internet Giants, drawing on its skills in marketing, advertising and communication.

Successfully, with 142,000 people now working directly for the high-tech sector. Google, which in 2001 had just one employee working out of a Manhattan café, has just opened a main office for 12,000 employees on the banks of the Hudson in a $2.1 billion property deal.

The building occupies St. John’s Terminal, a former sea freight terminal that has been used as an office building since 1966. The project designed by the COOKFOX agency radically transforms the site, replacing the existing three-storey logistics hub with a nine-storey building built to ‘Californian’ standards, characterised by a studious yet relaxed working atmosphere.

A terrace overlooking the river has been installed on the roof of the former terminal, whose industrial character has been preserved and even enhanced by the architects. The elevation adopts the style of the daylight factories, the large multi-storey factories built across the country at the beginning of the 20th century. Rather than a smooth, continuous curtain wall, COOKFOX Architects opted for a grid of large openings defining a pattern of windows on the scale of the city, based on a basic module combining glass and metal, with the top and underside featuring zinc elements that subtly surround the technical installations on the roof.

The QUARTZ-ZINC® colour could symbolise grey matter, now the raw material for this industrial cathedral of the 21st century.