Wednesday morning’s decision does not approve LinkedIn’s project; it merely gives the company the green light to turn in formal plans. LinkedIn is working with the architecture firm Studios, the design house that did the iconic Silicon Graphics headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway — now Google’s main headquarters building.
The council also allocated full development requests to Broadreach Capital Partners and Rees Properties for much smaller projects; at the meeting, Broadreach disclosed it had an agreement to lease its planned 225,000-square-foot building to Google — a deal that had not been previously announced.
Council members did not allocate any office space to the Sobrato Organization, which was requesting about 229,000 square feet of so-called “bonus floor area ratio” space (see my explainer, here). It’s possible, however, that Sobrato could turn in a separate project, including office and residential, if it “self-mitigates” traffic, officials said.
The council decision, on a 4-3 vote, came at the stroke of midnight, six and a half hours after the meeting began. It was the climax of a years-long planning process for the North Bayshore — one of the world’s most corporation-rich business parks — that has seen plenty of twists and turns.
The relatively arcane process gained worldwide attention earlier this year as Google revealed a stunning design for a campus expansion that would feature glass-domed buildings amid winding trails and open space. But the amount of demand — from Google, LinkedIn, and a number of other developers — provided the added tension of not enough office capacity to go around.
This image is embedded in ...
- Google Loses to LinkedIn in Silicon Valley Headquarters Pitch, Saturday, May 9, 2015 - 06:08
- Factories for the Information Age: Would you want Google as your neighbor?, Monday, March 16, 2015 - 08:52