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Work Spaces

To power their offices, Google has an arrangement with Bullfrog who supplies their office with the electricity they need from 100% carbon-free sources including wind power and low-impact water power. As part of the arrangement, Bullfrog generates an equal amount of green power as consumed by Google and injects that into the city’s power grid.

While the desk stations are modeled after Google’s US offices, which typically have their desks packed tightly together, each station has low barriers to promote collaborative socializing and cross-talk. Employees can easily lean over there neighbour’s fence as it were for a consult. The office area was created to make use of as much natural lighting as possible and to also include small relaxation areas with bean bag chairs and a programmable massage chair near the windows. The chair, as you can imagine, gets a lot of use.

For their office equipment, Google chose Herman Miller Resolve Workstations that are made up of 27% recycled materials (15% post-consumer, 15% pre-consumer). The stations are designed to be assembled using a simple system of poles, trusses, and support arms that are themselves made up of 25% recycled material and are very easy to disassemble and transport should Google make another move. Even the bubbleback panels are made of recycled pop cans and the whole system can be sent off for recycling again when it’s time to dispose of it. The steel itself has a powder paint finish for negligible VOCs.

Herman Miller filing cabinets are made from 29% recycled steel with the powder paint finish comprised of 50% recycled paint materials and the whole assembly can be recycled again at disposal.

For their chairs they selected Steelcase Think, Leap, and Amia chairs. Considered the first “cradle to cradle” product in the sense that they are completely made from recyclable materials (approx. 98%) and can be 100% recycled again at their end of use. In each design the back padding is made from 50% recycled material and the chairs are coated with powder-coated paints, water-based adhesives, and a solvent-free process.Even the Steelcase whiteboards are considered “Cradle to Cradle” and offer no VOCs.

A Canadian Solution

In researching environmental choices for their office concept, Google stressed the importance of finding local materials, technologies, and services.

“In researching options from outside Canada, we found that while you were saving in one area you were losing in transporting them, so we didn’t do that” explains Caminsky. “The doors are all made with Canadian trees, it’s a Canadian company that builds those, all the stuff is built in Canada, all the carpets are resourced out of Canada, all the food that we bring in is organic and locally grown.”

Each area of the building is featured after a different region of the country. The back of the office is “Atlantic Canada” where one of the board rooms is structured into a light house and another has been given the name of “Peggy’s Cove”. The board room in the middle of the office features some of the architectural accents of houses in Quebec including two of the phone booths which have been accented with cornices and stucco as you would see on old style Montreal houses. The middle of the offices, where the cafeteria is located is the “Stampede”, because people typically run to get to the food and some of the design touches were inspired by the Calgary stampede. The large board room in the middle is called “Lake Louise” and includes a large mural of Lake Louise, while the Media Room has the Inukshuk from the Western Tundra, and the shower room is of course called Niagara Falls.

“The notion is to celebrate Canada as we are designing our place because it’s important to the people who work here” says Caminsky. “It’s important to Google, and celebrating the diversity of Canada is really nice. It’s all functional, it all works and it celebrates something to really be proud of.”