Working at Facebook is worth it just for access to its grounds, which, like most tech companies, are closer to a college campus than to a typical headquarters. The social media giant will be expanding its land empire via a 435,000 square foot rectangular chunk across the Bayfront Expressway, TIME reported. Pictures of the architectural plans drawn by Canadian-American Frank Gehry here.
Though the highway will separate Facebook's original Menlo Park campus and its new one, employees will be able to walk between the two by way of an underground tunnel, which the company purchased the rights to around the same time they moved into its current headquarters (and around the same time they bought the vacant piece of land), according to Tech Crunch. Clearly, they've been harboring expansion plans for some time.
Gehry's design has taken a few turns since he first took the job. One adjustment requested by Facebook was to better integrate the layout with the area's marshland. Another was to design buildings closer to Facebook's image.
"They felt some of those things were too flashy and not in keeping with the kind of the culture of Facebook, so they asked us to make it more anonymous," Gehry's partner Craig Webb told the Palo Alto Daily News. "Frank was quite willing to tone down some of the expression of architecture in the building."
Besides maybe the one-room layout (seen, to a smaller degreen, in the "Social Network") -- the largest of its kind in the world, according to Mark Zukerberg -- the most interesting part about the design is the rooftop forest and the surrounding woods in general. According to Tech Crunch, most if not all of the trees will be planted by the construction team. By the looks of it, employees will have access to their own personal forest, whether on the lower grounds or on the roof.
