Google Doubles in Seattle Market

KIRKLAND, Wash. — Earlier this month, Google announced that it’s doubling the size of its Kirkland campus located on the outskirts of Seattle. The project would add two new buildings on a five-acre plot of land west of the existing campus and would create enough room to hire about 1,000 more employees.

Construction on the 180,000-square-foot development will be led by Spokane-based SRM Development, which will lease the new space to Google. DLR Group, located in Seattle, is working as the architectural firm. The development will be designed to achieve, at minimum, a LEED Gold certification, with hopes for LEED Platinum certification.

Google opened a small office in Kirkland in 2004, and it has since grown into larger spaces. The company moved to its current location in 2009 and now has more than 600 employees who work on products such as Google Voice, Google Talk and portions of the Chrome browser and operating system.

Since Google started hiring engineers in Kirkland, it has had double-digit growth, and it is now the third largest engineering center for the company. With 3,200 employees in the New York office and thousands of employees at the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Google now has almost 40,000 employees overall.

Design work has just started, but the tentative plan involves a skybridge linking the old and new buildings. The new two-story buildings, which include two floors of underground parking, will be joined by a covered atrium that gives the development a look of a single structure.

Google is at the forefront of innovation, so it is no surprise that the project will include a green roof and deck and be built to the highest environmental standards. While still in the beginning of the design phase, the opportunities for creative interior spaces are almost endless. The current Kirkland offices have a climbing wall, two kitchens, music jam rooms, espresso bars and motorboats “docked” indoors that serve as informal meeting rooms and work spaces. In terms of green technology, the current office already has a bicycle-powered milkshake machine.

While it’s too soon to say how much the project will cost, the investment will be at least $47 million, based on an assessed value of the current, three-building campus, as reported in The Seattle Times. The two new buildings are expected to open in 2015, with construction starting as early as January 2014.

Google was one of the first tech companies to establish an engineering center in the Seattle area, and since then several others (Facebook, Salesforce.com, Splunk and Zynga) have started engineering centers in the region. Most of the Google recruits come from Microsoft and Amazon.com, which have growing Seattle campuses as well.