“Google for President”: Power and the Mediated Construction of an Unbuilt Big Tech Headquarters Project

Abstract Big Tech companies are powerful global actors that wield unprecedented influence, including in the realms of governance. How these companies position themselves through media is important to their power. Architecture plays a fundamental role in representations of Big Tech as influential agents, translating symbolic capital between fields, from architecture to Big Tech, and vice versa. Our qualitative content analysis of media of Google’s proposed project for a headquarters in Mountain View, California, shows how the mediatisation of renowned architects and their work helps translate the vast digital and financial power of Google into a palatable physical presence in a relatively small town with local concerns. The mediated architectural project provides a way for Google to step into governance roles while de-emphasising its global power. In this case, media representations of architecture are mobilised to construct a fictional future that a corporate actor presents as desirable locally and aspirational globally.

Nevertheless, Big Tech companies are quick to efface their own power, instead positioning themselves as enabling and empowering publics through the software platforms and services they provide, and affording the potential to redistribute power in democratic ways, away from states and institutions and towards individuals. 16ig Tech corporations wield their power through digital platforms and technologies globally, and through their infrastructures and facilities locally, thereby operating simultaneously in digital and physical space.Architecture and architects contribute in important ways to the social and civic recognition and thereby the authority of Big Tech, emplacing these transnational companies in distinct locales and showing them to be good neighbours while contributing to corporate branding as innovative and benevolent actors with authority at regional and global scales.
In this paper, we use the "mediated construction" 17 of an unbuilt Google headquarters to demonstrate how media practices in architecture serve the interests of powerful actors.The project was co-produced by a team of globally renowned architects and one of the most significant companies shaping contemporary society: the analysis of this as a "critical case" 18 may be instructive when considering other instances in which architecture, media, and power intersect.

The Mediated Construction of Google North Bayshore
The study of the relationship between architecture and media is crucial for understanding how power operates across multiple scales, allowing for a clearer understanding of the impact that architecture and media have on the distribution and exercise of power in societies.Architects not only construct physical structures but also contribute to the discursive construction of their projects in the public sphere by way of their "public utterances." 19The outcome of an architects' work, therefore, is not only buildings as material objects but also their "discursive depth." 20Built works of architecture have the potential to stabilise meanings, but it is the discursive strategies of architects that ultimately enable buildings to codify and thus reproduce social identities, and this is especially the case when it comes to internationally renowned architects. 21rchitects practice in and through media.Architects use media to "manage the interpretation of their buildings both inside and outside the field." 22This involves adopting narrative techniques to convey meaning to a variety of audiences, using presentations, lectures, promotional videos, press releases, and images to promote, explain, and associate meaning with a project before it gets built.In this way, a multimodal assemblage of verbal, visual, and written texts is mobilised across a variety of media platforms and formats to prefigure and support architectural constructions.Media translate symbolic power within the field of architecture in ways that, following sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, "always in the long run, guarantees 'economic' profits." 23This flow of symbolic capital in the field of architecture has been problematised by authors who have considered its relationship to power in a variety of contexts. 24rchitects who are adept at interacting with media, therefore, seem to be at an advantage in modern mediatised societies.For instance, the key role of the Architectural Review in promoting Alvar Aalto's work, and Aalto's skill at marketing, just as much as his skill at design, led to him being a household name in Finland. 25n a similar vein, "mountain boy" Charles-Edouard Jeanneret became a modern master only after he presented himself as Le Corbusier in L'Esprit Nouveau. 26More recently, Rem Koolhaas's experience as a journalist for the De Haagse Post and filmmaking with 1, 2, 3, Groep preceded his founding of OMA and "contribute [d] to the development of his idea of the animated building." 27ngaging with media allows architects to use their symbolic capital in service of the interests of large corporations.Media, according to theorist Nick Couldry, possess what Bourdieu terms "meta-capital," that is, the ability to influence and translate symbolic capital between otherwise autonomous social fields. 28In this paper we provide evidence that the mediated construction of Google's headquarters supports this kind of translation, such that symbolic capital generated by architects and architecture positions Google as a political actor engendering governance authority and with agency over matters of concern ranging in scope and scale from the intensely local (public space, transport, housing) to the global (climate change and environmental degradation).
Google moved to Mountain View, California, in 2003, first leasing a corporate campus designed in 1994 for Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) by STUDIOS Architecture and redesigned by Clive Wilkinson Architects as the Googleplex in 2005. 29The company's rapid expansion in the early 2000s left it needing ever more office space.On three occasions prior to the one we study here, Google commissioned architects to design a new headquarters: SHoP in 2008, Ingenhoven Architects in 2011, and NBBJ in 2013. 30These projects were not built; however, many of the formal and representational strategies (greenery and daylight and open space) in those projects continue in the project we analyse and remain evident in the built 2022 buildings.
For the 2015 design of its headquarters, Google was actively looking outside the pool of "experienced Valley architects" 31 for their commission, and it was the media practices of the selected team that alerted Google to their preferred team of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Heatherwick Studio.According to Thomas Heatherwick, in 2012, Michelle Kaufmann (director of Google's Rþ D Lab for the Built Environment) approached him after a TED talk, and it was his performance that led to the commission. 32n February 2015, Google posted a promotional video to YouTube-its video publishing platform-announcing to a global audience its project to design a new headquarters.The video, featuring Ingels, Heatherwick, and David Radcliffe (then Google's Vice President of Real Estate), describes an ambitious new headquarters in the Silicon Valley suburb of Mountain View.Before it could be built, the new headquarters had to be approved by the Mountain View City Council, which received proposals from seven tech companies for office development in the area.In May 2015, the council rejected Google's proposal in a four to three vote, choosing instead to allocate development rights to LinkedIn. 33City councillors cited the lack of affordable housing in the plan and the potential to increase traffic as reasons for their vote.City council member Jac Siegel said, "I live on a side street, and there are times I can't even get out of my driveway to get onto the side street; that's how bad it's gotten." 34ollowing this rejection, Google negotiated with LinkedIn to swap land and an agreement was made that enabled Google to develop two scaled-down buildings called Google Bay View and Google Charleston East; both opened in 2022.
Compared to Google's other previously proposed headquarter projects, the mediated construction of North Bayshore captures both more candid and more controlled visions of how Google sees itself and its role.Although North Bayshore was rejected by the local city council, it would be a mistake to dismiss this project as unsuccessful, especially if its success is measured by its discursive power and capacity to define a situation.Indeed, the global communication of the project suggests that Google still benefits from this fictional project to construct a self-image and to support the actually-built headquarters.
Our analysis focuses on the promotional video and public commentary which are analytically treated as a corpus of media that relationally constructs a narrative about Google and a public discourse around the architectural project. 35The YouTube comments responding to the video are not taken to represent a survey-response type dataset revealing the reactions of representative sample of the general public but rather are interpreted as a media discourse that extends the ratified participants beyond those powerful agents represented in the video itself to include the participation of an online public. 36We also consider ten visualisations of the project: renders released contemporaneously with the video and posted on ArchDaily.com,credited to "Google/BIG/Heatherwick Studio." 37ArchDaily has a powerful position in contemporary architectural publishing.Outside the traditional realms of scholarly journals or professional magazines, the website operates as a clearinghouse for architectural ideas, a "platform to collect and spread the most important information for architects seeking to build a nicest [sic] world." 38Claiming 13.6 million readers each month, it is a widely visited disseminator of contemporary architectural media and is not limited to a specialist architectural readership.Architects endorse the site, as does Bjarke Ingels, who says, "[w]ithin the field of architecture, ArchDaily is the one place where everything is going to be." 39 Here the variety of media practices (visual representations, verbal utterances, and written text) operates as a multi-modal corpus: visual representations contribute to and constitute discourses along with written and verbal ones, and if we conceptualise new (digital) media discourse as multimodal and relational, making distinctions between architectural images (as representations) and written texts (as discourses) becomes arbitrary and problematic.Further, all three (words, buildings, and images) are "doubly articulated" objects-operating simultaneously across symbolic and material dimensions. 40osted on YouTube on February 27, 2015, the 9:53-minute video "Google's Proposal for North Bayshore" has been widely shared and watched by millions of individuals (the channel has 10.6 million subscribers; the video has 1.75 million views and over seven hundred comments as of 2022); it uses ideas and themes from architecture and translates them onto the project and company, and vice versa.
Throughout the video Ingels, Heatherwick, and Radcliffe take turns speaking.The designers are each filmed in what appears to be their respective studios, while Radcliffe appears in the Google offices.The video can be analytically divided into six sections (see fig. 1 for a schematic summary).Section one commences with aerial footage approaching the project site from above the Bayshore Freeway, with Mountain View and the San Francisco Bay visible on the horizon.Ingels speaks first, followed by Heatherwick, and then Radcliffe.They introduce the context of Silicon Valley, noting its global importance but also the dissonance in "a valley that changed the world but has not changed itself" (Heatherwick, 0:28).Radcliffe bridges to section two stating that "[Google] scoured the world looking for a special architect" (0:42) to address this discrepancy.The architects then introduce themselves as the video depicts examples of their previous work.In some instances, the architects are shown experimenting with models.In section three, the architects further set up the problems facing Google in Mountain View.In section four, the three speakers present possible solutions to the problems they have set up earlier in the video, which (presumably only) their collaborative work will be able to fully solve.The imagery alternates between live footage of the presenters and images of greenery and people in urban settings.In section five the project is presented for the first time.The video shows renders and an architectural model, although these are not directly explained; rather, they act as visual elements that anchor the audio.In the final section, the architects deliver motivational messages about the necessity to innovate and the importance of their collective mission, conceived of as a "duty to reflect, in the physical environment, the values that have been manifested in the innovations that have come out from this part of California" (Heatherwick, 9:09).The script is accompanied by a soundtrack, alternating between uplifting/upbeat and tranquil background music, mixed intermittently with sounds of nature, most notably chirping birds.Associated with the video on its YouTube page is a thread of public commentary.Commenting requires a username and each comment is published with a relative date-"[x] years ago"-rather than an absolute date stamp.The comments are mostly in English and are primarily written text, although some include emojis.We interpreted all comments posted before August 2022.After eliminating those not written in English (the language of the video), those that consisted of only emojis, and all that were clearly unrelated to the video (such as obvious advertisements), we were left with 626 comments to help us understand the ongoing media construction of the project.When we quote from comments in this paper, we do so verbatim and without the use of "[sic]" to indicate spelling or grammatical errors, as this provides the most accurate representation of the media in question. 41he ten renders released on ArchDaily also feature as visual imagery in the video itself.They include one aerial, seven exterior, and two interior views (fig.2).All renders focus on the surrounding landscape and social action as the most salient elements, rather than the building itself.This is even the case in the interior views, which feature the translucent roof/fac ¸ade but are oriented outwards to the greenery and sky beyond.No renders show cars: pedestrians and cyclists occupy the streets, and trees and greenery dominate the images.People represented are undertaking leisure activities: gardening, meandering with kids, walking dogs, playing guitar, or doing group yoga.

The Interpretative Flexibility of Non-architecture
The video includes images of the proposed domed structures of the new headquarters, using these as cinematic backdrops for the performative utterances of the speakers as they cast the corporation as a benevolent local actor performing a quasi-governmental role.At a granular level, the video constructs a narrative of how, through architecture, Google is saving the present from itself and constructing a better future, thereby presenting a gift to both its local neighbours and the world more broadly.The present conditions of things such as work, transportation, and Google's current headquarters, are framed negatively.(For instance, "When you visit the Google campus, there's lots of trees.But there's this constant, major undermining of that by the road system and the infrastructure required for all of those cars.And it just feels like trees are, like, street furniture"-Heatherwick, 3:28.)These problems of the present are to be solved for a better future through innovation, technology, collaboration, and creativity.
The video's narrative starts by establishing a collaboration between the world's best designers ("We scoured the world, looking for a special architect … And we really got down to what we believed were the two best in class"-Radcliffe, 1:41) and an enlightened company from a revolutionary place ("Silicon Valley has been the cradle of this series of innovations that over the last decades have propelled technology and world economy"-Ingels, 0:09).Together this team will work together utilising their individual and shared creativity, while also looking to nature for cues and inspiration: "In nature, things aren't over-programmed or over-prescribed" (Ingels, 6:39).After learning from nature, the team will use technology and resources ("All of this science and know-how is going into this project"-Radcliffe, 8:17) to create a future that is sustainable, flexible, civic-minded, and that will enable new ways of working.The result will be Google's gift to the neighbourhood, and indeed the world: "A motivator for the work we're doing now is to be generous.You can provide facilities that can be shared with people who don't work for an organization and keep an organization's feet on the ground" (Heatherwick, 5:22)."And then the last piece, which is really Google at its heart, in anything we do, trying to leave the project giving something back to the world, that they didn't have before we started" (Radcliffe, 1:23).
In the accompanying imagery, this generous future is visualised in a way that cannot be captured in the verbal narrative of the video.Through the benevolence of Google, the days are golden and clear, people are healthy, happy, fit, and come in a variety of skin tones.Leisure, work, and other activities unfold within a rich social reality beneath the boughs of mature trees and on a carpet of green, lush lawns.Birds fly overhead, people laugh, skate, cycle, and walk.The aestheticisation of nature and the affective qualities of these images is familiar within the genre of artists' impressions: they have a rhetorical function and a normative impulse to present a future the world needs, and which the project can provide.
As discussed in the following section, much of the accompanying YouTube commenters celebrate the paradigm of Google as a saviour, petitioning the corporation to build something similar elsewhere.But others remain sceptical, aware of the fictional nature of this construction, positioning it alongside other (obviously fictional) media constructs.Some YouTubers resent Google as a bad-faith actor, based on a general scepticism of big business but sometimes also informed by local issues and lived experience of Silicon Valley residents.
Throughout the video, Google is cast in roles typically reserved for governments, with the speakers at times claiming the project will address issues that are normally within the purview of state and local government authorities.Although building a corporate headquarters is fundamentally about making a place for employees to carry out their jobs within a market economy, Radcliffe positions it instead as an act of community-building: "The buildings themselves allow both the public as well as employees to move through them.We wanted to make sure that we created communities where bikes and pedestrians felt like they didn't have to worry about cars zipping by at seventy miles an hour" (Radcliffe, 5:38).This concern with public transportation and public open space (traditionally both remits of governments) are recurring themes, with the transformative potential of the project promoted repeatedly: "transform[ing] the sea of parking that you find today into a sort of a natural landscape, where you'll find an abundance of green" (Ingels, 3:53); "what we've tried to do is take a step back and say, … 'What will transit look like in the future?'Not 'What is transit today?'" (Radcliffe, 0:42).In this way, Google implicitly claims the role of an actor in local government concerns.But it is doing so with the soft power of governance, rather than the statutory or legislative authority of governments, using market position to attract and commission the best-in-class of the global pool of design to provide innovative solutions for the future.
Significantly, the comments conflate Google's remit with that of government-a corporation as responsible for providing public space and amenities such as parks, transportation systems, and housing-at all levels (local, regional, national, and transnational).For example, locally, Google ought to provide housing: "make an effort at providing new housing for your employees.As it is now, your employees are driving many San Franciscans out of their homes, and destroying the fabric of the present communities" (7 years ago).At the state level, there is the implication that Google is responsible for public education: "Google that's cool and all but can you like do that to MVHS [Mountain Valley High School] first?I mean it's a learning environment and all, so why not make it more fun, I mean school is pretty depressing, could spark some creativity for your future workers" (7 years ago).Or, regionally, to fix other cities: "For a real challenge, move to Oakland and make it into truly great city that it once was" (7 years ago).Google is, for some, even equated with the leader of a nation state: "lets see a cleaner and greener earth.google for president" (7 years ago).Or a nation state: "When will Google make it's own country so I can apply for an international travel card there?" (7 years ago).
While the video is ostensibly about an architectural project, both the official representatives of the project (Radcliffe and the designers) and the participants in the YouTube discourse see this project as a means for Google to assert its power to make a difference in the world.The appropriate level of intervention remains vague, but the narrative constructed around the architecture places Google in a governance role, exercising its soft power to reach well beyond the translucent walls of its headquarters to affect transportation, public space, climate change, and other arenas typically associated with governments.
The buildings presented in the video and renders retain interpretive flexibility, that is, they are non-representational, non-iconic, and almost not really buildings.This is quite different from previous proposals by ShOP, Ingenhoven and NBBJ, in which formally specific buildings are clearly delineated in renders and models.Indeed, Ingels and Heatherwick use their video performance to tell stories about what they refer to as "creating environments" more than anything about the construction of built form.
The discourse in the YouTube commentary demonstrates a public understanding of the constructed, somewhat fictional, nature of the Google North Bayshore headquarters project narrative.This is most evident when the commenters offer explicit comparison to other fictional mediated architecture from the realms of science fiction movies (The Wizard of Oz, Terminator, Logan's Run, Elysium, Biodome), television shows (The Simpsons, Under the Dome), books (Anthem, The Circle, Harry Potter) and even computer games (Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed).Sometimes these fictional comparisons are used to endorse the project: "When i read 'The Circle' i were allways imagining something like this you are now working on.I really support you and the Ideas and visions you have and realized and will realize in the futer are allways a piece of the future brought to the humankind!Thank you for being what you are Google!"(6 years ago).Other times, they point out its dystopian potential: "Is this the pilot to Under the Dome 2: Terrorists Poison the Google Air?" (7 Years ago); or "Biodome?Really?How about using some of those billions to save some forests or plant some damn trees … U know save the world as opposed to save ourselves … Not to go all conspiracy nut here but seems to me Google got the heads up from the 3 letter agencies under which they operate that they are planing a global catastrophe" (7 years ago).By invoking fictional referents, the YouTube commenters situate the Google North Bayshore project in the domain of utopian and dystopian futures that exist in and through media, but outside of "real world" architecture.Additionally, they demonstrate the translational capacity of media and its ability to move between different worlds.
Conversely, there is no comparable trend of referring to "real" works of architecture, although there are plenty that might reasonably have been invoked.Well-known projects like Frei Otto's Munich Olympic Stadium or Grimshaw Architects' Eden Project are absent from the commentary.Partly, this may be because the discourse on YouTube is not a specialist architectural one.But it also may be because the commenters have extended the same suspension of disbelief usually afforded to fictional media genres to a purportedly "real-world" project that is presented as a potential future reality through a media construction.
The buildings themselves are not clearly visualised in the renders and video.Always obscured (by people, vegetation, or animals) and often in the background, with a low resolution and detail, the design of the buildings is vague in materials, structure, and detailing.It is arguably this interpretive flexibility that makes the project available as a symbolic vessel, open to many meanings in its interpretation.This is coherent with the way the architects do not speak explicitly of architecture in the video, instead discussing the project as an exercise not in architectural design, but in the creation of environments (for example, "The desire, really, is to try to create pieces of environment"-Heatherwick, 7:14).By disrupting the distinction between nature and culture ("we're blurring the outside world and the inside world"-Heatherwick, 8:02) while at the same time somehow reinforcing the dyad as such, the environments become capable of engendering creativity in the workers based therein ("what is the best possible environment we can make to invent, engineer, and most importantly, make ideas happen and go out into the world"-Heatherwick, 3:05).
The receding, non-architecture of Google North Bayshore indicates how Google seeks to be interpreted while also demonstrating how the media created by the architectural field (in this case renders and models) are used within this positioning; remembering how, for Jones, it is "architects' claim to critical autonomous practice that gives the architectural field its capacity to generate symbolic capital for corporate and state commissioners." 42

Architecture as Media Practice
In the reality constructed in media, Google is a virtuous local citizen who will give back to the Mountain View neighbourhood.As a globally influential company it is hiring internationally renowned architects, not to assert itself on a global stage but rather to convince local authorities of the company's commitment to local interests.Global power and the symbolic capital of international architects is translated to be spent locally.This is necessary because although in the digital world Google exerts immense power and acts in governance roles, it is not a government agency and must still negotiate its physical existence with local statutory authorities.All the digital power in the world does not allow Google to wield unfettered control over local land resources.Instead, Google utilises narratives about what architecture might be or how it might look to speak to both a broad audience and specifically the sevenmember Mountain View City Council.This is why the media power of architects is enlisted, why the buildings of a corporation are presented as gifts to the world (rather than a campus for an elite class of office workers), and why so much effort goes into developing a media narrative of what this generosity would look like.In this, the mediated construction of the North Bayshore project echoes the subterfuge Banham saw in the greenery on Silicon Valley campuses in the 1980s.
Although Google's proposal did not convince the local authority, the effectiveness of these tactics continues while there is an audience willing to accept the vision presented in the renders and video.Google's headquarters illustrates an important difference between the architecture of governance and the architecture of governmentswhile governments negotiate with the governed, they retain statutory and legislative capacities not yet available to Big Tech.But institutions, including powerful corporations, must negotiate with governments for their emplacement in geographic locations, and media and architecture provide means of doing so.Steve Jobs had to appear before the Cupertino City Council to petition for approval for Apple's headquarters, and the fate of the Google headquarters was sealed by four Mountain View city councillors.These companies control vast wealth, employ tens of thousands of people across the globe, and filter the majority of available information to the world's thoroughly mediatised societies, and yet they are required to negotiate with elected members of a local council to successfully have something built.
This raises the question of what is at stake in a world in which architects perform as media presenters, large corporations promise to save nature (and by extension the world), and the "real world" politics of building and the visions of utopian/dystopian other worlds depicted in television shows, movies, and games are addressed in the same sentence.The case of Google's headquarters project shows how a powerful client and renowned architects work together to negotiate shared power and symbolic capital.Symbolic capital is translated between fields (technology, architecture, political) through media ("i watched both of their ted talks, amazing amazing.so excited google teamed up with both … "-7 years ago).What, exactly, the architects get out of this reciprocity remains an important but open question-we can propose some suggestions.First, their own power is consolidated, and symbolic capital is strengthened through their selection as "best in class" (Radcliffe, 1:56) by a benevolent and powerful client; second, and related to the first point, this capital can be cashed in for ever more substantial (and lucrative) commissions.For example, the same Heatherwick/BIG team designed Google's headquarters in London-a "groundscraper" that picks up some of the themes from North Bayshore and translates them into the language of a dense European city centre rather than a sparse American office park. 43Additionally, by becoming media performers (as well as architects) and through the translative capacity of media meta-capital, architects like Heatherwick and Ingels become active in ever expanding spheres, escalating the role of the architect as a public figure with authority to speak on a range of issues and matters beyond the construction of buildings. 44If architects and corporations work together to negotiate power, and media provide mechanisms for translating symbolic capital between fields, then it becomes crucial to question, critique, and ultimately participate in the public discourse sustaining architecture's visionary futures.
The case presented in this paper shows how architects, their utterances and ideas, are staged to construct a targeted narrative of a globally influential company.The mediated construction of architecture is used not only to communicate a proposed reality but to sustain audience attention and hence control the interpretation of that proposed reality by mobilising the unique capacity of media, namely the "power of constructing reality." 45As such, we understand North Bayshore as an instantiation of powerful mediated architecture: a projection developed primarily to define a situation rather than to construct a physical building.
It was Lawrence Vale, writing on the power of "mediated monuments," 46 who proposed that, when it comes to nation states, by reifying national identity into built form, architecture consolidates power.The case of Google, North Bayshore shows that a mediated construction can be powerful in ways that are quite unrelated to its realisation as a built edifice.This idea seems to be borne out in other projects, for instance, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi by Foster þ Partners or OMA's recent masterplan for BMW's plant in Munich, the main objective of which is not necessarily to become a building but to construct a media narrative that sustains attention to the point that it will affect reality.It is indeed possible that when discourse is powerful enough, and the media construction is sufficiently convincing, it may not even be necessary to build anymore-historical examples of unbuilt architecture that have been impactful through their mediation include Palace of the Soviets (Boris Iofan, Moscow, 1933), Halle des Volkes (Albert Speer, Berlin, 1939), and the Manhattan Dome (Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, New York, 1960).The case of Google in

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Schematic summary of the video, with topics and speakers indicated for each section.Source: authors.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Content type in the ten renders used in the video and released on ArchDaily.Source: authors.