Google's techno-utopian campus design by BIG and Heatherwick is part of a new wave of interest in surprisingly self-centred "hippie architecture", says Mimi Zeiger.

... It is this last bit, the mash-up of futuristic ambitions with the earthy tendencies of 1970s Bohemian Modern brings to mind a recent addition to the hippie roster: Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels' Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

Although more environment bubble than yurt, the renderings depict an archaic future steeped in the ethos of hippie architecture. One that is self-sufficient, ecological, technological, utopian.

It fits squarely into a Silicon Valley ideology previously described by Sam Jacob in Dezeen as he discussed Norman Foster's pastorial design for the Apple headquarters and Frank Gehry's green-roofed Facebook campus.

"With trees, landscaping, cafes, and bike paths weaving through these structures, we aim to blur the distinction between our buildings and nature," said Google in a post on its official blog.

Heatherwick and Ingels' design is unlikely to undergo revisions as the site moves to a different 18.6-acre location. In a piece in the New Yorker, Nathan Heller suggests that the new headquarters places its ideals in the monastic.

"Today, Google's architectural perplexity offers certain windows onto Silicon Valley's changing ideas about work culture and corporate community, a blend of workplace flexibility and intellectual hermeticism," he writes. "If the Valley has a premise these days, it is that anything is possible – as long as there are generous resources and no interventions from outside."

From Esalen self-help to Don Draper's enlightenment to Google's techno-utopian workplace, each example reflects a disengagement from civic life and privileges individualised self-fulfillment. This is the dark side of hippie architecture: the forms promise a collective embrace, but deliver a cold shoulder as chilly as the Big Sur fog.