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.

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.

So, I don't understand this construction. They have placed rebar over the wood flooring, placed temperory supports under the floor, and have poured a cement top over the wood floor. Why go back to the concrete floor with that expensive wood under it, when they could have just done conventional steel and concrete construction?

Close up for the first floor showing the temperory supports holding the wood floor while the cement already poured on the first floor cures. The white pipe, and the white tank just visible to the right is a water purification system in place to avoid contaminating the soil in the area.