First Image

I frequently ride my bicycle along the Stevens Creek Trail, and am fascinated by the enormous construction going on to the north of NASA Ames. It is the new Google Bay View Campus, and here are some images I took as construction progresses.

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This is about August, 2017 with the 42.2 acre site leveled, and a few of the tower crane foundations poured. At this time, there was a temporary chain link fence along the trail, through which I'm pointing the camera.

Caissons Being Bored out and Poured

The blue machines bore 100 foot-or-so holes into which is lowered a heat exchange tube loop, and then the hole is filled with cement. There is so much concrete in the entire development, that it wouldn't be practical to truck it in, so there is a cement plant to the right of this picture. Central Concrete company is supplying the cement, or at least the transit mixing trucks to deliver it to various places at site.

The tube system is an effort to dump or supply heat to the buildings using the earth underground as a sink or source of heat. I believe the tubes, at least some of them are also structural elements, foundation supports for the buildings themselves.

View to the North Side of the Campus

More tower cranes springing up. At this juncture there were about four erected.

Close-up of a Tower Crane

My guess is the tower cranes are about 120 feet above the ground.

View to the North Side of the Campus

Workers are placing rebar for a main wall. In the background can be seen a vertical square form in place for a main column. The brown vertical sheets are form work for walls being constructed.

No More Fence to Look Through

The temporary chain link fence has now been replaced with a permanent one, so I no longer have to poke the camera between the links. Yet another red tower crane has sprouted.

North View Form Work

Looking north with wall formwork in place, and some already poured walls visible.

Main Support Wall Form Work

Workers have completed a main service road in the foreground, with formwork for a building's walls behind. The tower cranes are busy hoisting rebar for the interior floors.

View to the South

Cranes are working on construction of buildings to the south side of the campus. In the background behind the red crane to the right, is the exhaust port of the 40 x 80 NASA wind tunnel.

Main Wall Formwork

A view of a west wall with the formwork in place. The wall has been poured, but the formwork is yet to be stripped.

Another Tower Crane Sprang Up

The last tower crane has been installed. The cranes are built piece-by-piece using the yellow portable crane in the stowed position in the background.

Main Walls

These are walls that had formwork in place in the above images, with the formwork stripped to reveal some exterior walls. In the background is a pour going on of the main floor area.

Rebar, Rebar, Rebar

Massive amounts of rebar are on trailers lined up along the west side of the campus fence. There were five trailers full of rebar along the fence.

Floor Supports

When floors are poured, the formwork holding the liquid cement has to be supported from below. Those support posts, all brand new by--the-way, are in the bundles next to the road.

Main Cement Plant

This is the original main cement plant servicing about 16 Central Concrete transit mixers trucking cement to pour the foundation piers, and ground floor.

New South Temporary Cement Plant

Well I guess the main cement plant wasn't sufficient for all the walls being poured, so here is another temporary plant near the main original plant.

New North Temporary Cement Plant

Well I guess two cement plants wasn't enough capacity, so here is a third plant down at the north end of the new campus. With all the walls and columns being poured, three plants was needed to keep on schedule.

Pouring Inner Columns

All the form work for the outer walls is visible here. The cement pumper is placing cement into inner columns.

Between Buildings

This is a view near the south of the 42 acre campus, showing activity in between the construction of the other buildings under construction.

Wall Form Work

Here is outer wall formwork on the south-side of the campus building. The buildings on the south end of campus are a few weeks behind the north-most building.

Equipment Area

I'm doing some speculating here, but this looks like it will be a machine room area. Previous to the placing of the brown pipe work, an excavator dug an at least 30 foot hole which was filled with a circular concrete form. Now they have started to place the large diameter pipe in the same area.

Huge Concrete Tunnel

This is in the same area as the above mentioned deep hole. The long concrete structure was poured early on in the construction, and I think it is a tunnel. Perhaps this area is the final terminus of all the crap the little Googleites will dump out as they digest their free food eaten during the day.

More Walls Being Poured

Even more cement wasted.

North Campus Activity

Not sure what is going on at the north end, but with a couple excavators involved, it must be something.

Looking South

Last view to the south from March 3rd 2018.

Microsoft

Microsoft had a Mt View campus just a half-mile from the new Google Bay View Campus. These perfectly good buildings are history as you can see an excavator has been destroying this one. There were about six buildings, and at this date, about half of them have been razed. What a waste! Some government entity ought to force these companies to make better use of their assets.

What was amusing is, as I was watching excavators destroying this building, flat bed trucks were still carrying off server equipment removed from a next door building about to be demolished. One would think, Microsoft would have taken their computer equipment before allowing demolition.

This demolition is to make way for a new Microsoft Mt View Campus. I suppose the Micro-brain Mr. Big is envious of the new Google campus up the street, so he has to have his own new campus with green roofs, and I'll bet Google won't have a soccer field on one of its roofs. Read all about it here:

Microsoft-mountain-view-campus-revamp-images-msft.html

Adios Old Microsoft

Returning on March 18th to see how the razing of the former Microsoft buildings at their Mt View campus is going. The building in the image above is history...

Here is the next building to the south, partially razed. It appears that nothing has been reclaimed for sale or use elsewhere. I see perfectly good transformers being dumped rather than reclaimed. I still maintain this is an enormous waste, but it does create jobs...

Now it's March 26th with not many intact buildings left. The excavator to the left has been fitted with a large hydraulic shear which cuts I beams in two like they were twigs. The middle excavator picks up metallic pieces, and places them into the hopper of the mill which grinds the material into tiny bits. The excavator to the right is loading large trucks with the debris for recycling in China or Japan.

These guys are sorting debris into piles to be ground up and recycled. They sort by rebar, steel like I beams, aluminum, and concrete. There are several on-site mills which are grinding the material to small pieces for all but the concrete, and into a fine grain aggregate for the case of the concrete.

Today is March 18th, 2018, a Sunday, and the jobsite is totally dead. The only activity is a security detail truck periodically making the rounds

This view is of the south building site, which is rapidly catching up to the progress on the north site side.

A view mid-span of the north-west building with the first floor under construction.

It takes an enormous number of support posts to bear the weight of the floor to be poured above.

Looking north with work going on the first floor. Well not today, because it's Sunday...

I zoomed into the opening mid-span between a north building and a south building under construction. This port may be an entrance to an underground parking garage - just my guess.

There is to be an extension of Charleston Road across the Stevens Creek, and Stevens Creek Trail, which would land right about here...

Here back on March 26th, a Monday with hundreds of workers back. This is the same view as above. I see walls protruding back toward the camera on either side of the rectangular hole. Judging by the orthogonal rebar protruding from those walls, there is to be a concrete horizontal element yet to be defined.

I'm still curious to know what the deal is with this tunnel inside that large rectangular concrete structure. Something rectangular is going on the west end of it, as we can see all the attachment rebar sticking up with a large rectangular hole which is covered here to keep the rain out.

A wider view of the buildings on the north side of the campus.

Last image from March 26th where they are working on a concrete pumper truck to the right of center. It had been busy pouring the first floor in one of the southerly buildings, but they swung the delivery hose end around where several men are working at the snout of the machine. There is apparently some problem with it.

Today is Sunday April 22nd, so no construction workers are around to give me the finger. Vertically, the buildings are still at the same level. The concrete needs 28 days to cure, so the first floor layer is still being supported with posts from the ground level.

This view is between the north and south buildings with a lot going on. I see many rebar structures waiting formwork, but I'm most fascinated by that steel rectangular structure standing vertically in the middle of the frame. It appears that it will eventually support an enormous weight, and I can't wait to see what will get attached to it.

A closer view of the center area between buildings. I would say the steel vertical structure was designed to support more weight than a steel reinforced concrete column could hold. That's just my speculation, but I'll keep coming back until it's clear.

Since there isn't that much going on at the Bay View Campus construction, I rode my bike over to another Google building going up at the corner of Charleston, and Shoreline. This is a building I am calling a turtle building because of the unusual turtle-like covering which is to go over the whole thing.

One of the curved column supports is just visible in this image, otherwise at this juncture, the site is basically just a hole in the ground.

Today is Thursday, May 3rd, 2018 with this view showing the most activity I see on site. Workers are placing an enormous amount of rebar on that surface, the left corner of which has a steel rectangular support. I'm anxious to see what that will eventually support, that floor surface also which is getting more rebar than other floors I have seen in the north most building.

They're using a crane lifted cement mortar to lift cement to the interior area under construction. Apparently, this lift is beyond the reach of a cement pumper, or the amount being poured is too small to bring in the big pumper truck. I did see three trucks feeding the mortar while I was watching, with each truck capable of about 10 yards of cement.

Here is the mortar in transit to the interior of the south-most building.

And here is where the lift is happening, way inside beyond my viewing position. I should bring in a UAV on a Sunday to get better reconnaissance, except they are strictly verboten because of the proximity of Moffett Field, just to the south.

Another interesting area of activity is this rectangular hole, which as you can see is receiving a lot of rebar. It looks like something quite heavy will be sited here. Two days ago, I was here on my bike sans the camera unfortunately, and they were either setting up or taking down a large mobile crane. There were three support 18 wheel flat bed trucks with counterweights and other accessories for the crane. Today everything is gone, and I see no new heavy items that could have been off-loaded.

It's now May 28th, Decoration Day, so no workers are about. This is a zoomed view of a west wall with some exposed rebar, and the formwork being placed around it. There is a doorway visible in the wall which allows entry to a room whose walls have yet to be defined, probably an equipment room of some type.

This view is between the north and south buildings on the west side where we can see into the interior spaces. The rebar is in place on the floor area, and those steel supports look strong. There must be some significant weight to go on the next level, since regular concrete columns were not adequate here.

Here is a vehicle passageway into the interior of the north-west building. It looks like two lanes worth - in and out probably, so that ground level enclosure looks like parking. There is a ramp just to the north of this area which looks like a vehicle access to the first floor level. I suppose this entire building could be parking oriented, I'll just have to wait and see.

Here I am again looking at the rectangular concrete tunnel which has now sprouted a cylinder of concrete. There is also a manhole concrete cylinder, and you can see where the ground level is to be where the manhole cover is in place. Also, there is vapor proofing (yellow sheets) all around the concrete rectangular tunnel indicating that this entire area will be filled in with dirt someday.

Here is close-up of that parking garage entry/exit. All the sheets in the foreground look to be plywood with a light coating of cement on them, so I infer that they are all formwork.

This is a close up of that concrete cylinder that sprang from the rectangular tunnel.

Update to June 30th, 2018, and back to the Microsoft expansion. This small building at the north end of the campus is being built using CLT which is Cross Laminated Timber. The slices look like plywood on steroids, many thick layers glued together. I don't know if this construction method is cheaper than steel and concrete, but it doesn't look it. It wouldn't be past these screwball tech companies to use some "sustainable" material even if it was more expensive.

This long webpage is turning into a kind of Mt View tech construction narrative...

Another view of the same small building. Even the columns are made of this glorified plywood. To the left, we can see the roof trusses also of the same plywood construction.

This close up shows how the floor interlocks with a steel I-beam. We can see how thick the timber is.

Okay! On to the Google Bay View Campus now on June 30th 2018, where we FINALLY see the north-west building's envelope springing into reality.

All the concrete work up to this point seems to all be directed at the automobile parking facilities, which are underground. Big-rigs are driving around on that top concrete surface with up to 80,000 pounds of steel columns, about six of which are visible here. They are the slender guyed columns. which might actually be aluminum, I can't tell from here, but they are an aluminum color.

Here is a tighter view of the beginning columns for the north-west building. Another reason I think they might be aluminum is because they are all guyed, not self standing. If they were steel, I think columns of that height could free-stand, even with the winds out here on the bay.

I've now moved a long city block to Charleston and Shoreline where the building envelope of the new turtle shell Google building is being constructed. It is the yellow steel affair that looks like an amusement park ride. The campus will occupy that entire block lined with the green fence. The tall yellow object is a crane to lift the yellow steel tubes into place for bolting, and later welding in place.

There is another building corner springing out to the left behind the light pole. Up close I can see another substantial concrete column taking shape for the corner of the building closer to where I'm standing.

Now you see why I'm calling it a turtle shell building.

The steel tube work is impressive to look at. It could almost be a stadium under construction.

Here is a better view of the portion of the roof in place at this juncture. The rust-colored steel supports simply hold up the yellow tubes until they can be bolted into place with the rest of the structure.

This is a close up of a major ground support. Maybe Google could incorporate a roller coaster in this structure to make it worth something more than a pretentious waste of money.