Last week, Mountain View's city council unanimously approved a scaled-back design for Google's new campus. The 595,000-square-foot building, by Bjarke Ingels Group and Thomas Heatherwick, is expected to be completed in late 2019.
The project, known as Charleston East, has gone through many iterations since it was first revealed in 2015. Most notably, the project—essentially a campus of buildings set beneath transparent canopies—had to be reconfigured for a smaller site. Gone is the network of Frei-Otto-meets-Buckminster-Fuller domes. In their stead is an opaque, solar panel–clad roof. In renderings, the design looks decidedly more grim. (But at least it's no longer a physical representation of the metaphorical Silicon Valley bubble.)