Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters features an impressive, 9-acre rooftop garden—a welcome reprieve for the social media giant's 2,800 employees.
As reported by In Menlo, the garden is filled with 90 percent native fauna, 350 evergreen, deciduous and flowering trees and a one-half mile long winding pathway.
Not only that, the garden is also home to resident and migrant birds and is adorned with Gehry-designed teepees, lawn furniture, art installations from artists Smith Allen, Jay Nelson and Evan Shively as well as white boards for outdoor meetings.
Facebook moved into their expansive 430,000-square-foot Frank Gehry-designed campus last March.
“[Gehry] envisioned a place that employees could use as a space to walk because there wasn’t space around the building,” Facebook’s sustainability and community outreach manager Lauren Swezey explained to the publication. “He designed a palette of colors in bands across the roof.”
The Canadian architect is known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Chris Guillard, a founding partner of CMG Landscape Architecture, helped design Facebook's green roof.
"Work has become more mobile and fluid so you can actually step away from your desk and have a small conversation with people," Guillard told the The San Jose Mercury News.
The Mercury News described the roof as "more like a park than the top of an office" that overlooks the city's marshlands.
Facebook's main office, nicknamed MPK 20, has the unique distinction of having the world's largest open floor plan, or as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described on a Facebook post in March 2015 touting the new HQ:
"Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together. We wanted our space to create the same sense of community and connection among our teams that we try to enable with our services across the world.
"To do this, we designed the largest open floor plan in the world—a single room that fits thousands of people. There are lots of small spaces where people can work together, and it’s easy for people to move around and collaborate with anyone here. On the roof is a 9-acre park with walking trails and many outdoor spaces to sit and work."
According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg himself was the one who pushed for the rooftop garden:
Mr. Zuckerberg, who appreciates the restorative power of hiking in the outdoors.
It was his idea to cover the entire roof of the structure with a garden, which is accessible throughout the building via elevators and the external stairs and ramps. Gravel paths wander among mature trees, mounded shrubs, and drought-tolerant grasses, offering views of mountains and an expanse of San Francisco Bay. The garden makes space for meetings (white boards are provided), naps and quiet contemplation, fueled by coffee stands and a cafe. A two-thirds-mile walking loop accommodates the peripatetic Mr. Zuckerberg.
“We have a culture of walking meetings,” Swezey also told In Melo. “People come up to the roof to conduct one on ones. They get some fresh air, too!”
Lori Goler, the company's chief people officer, told CNBC: "It really creates an environment where people can collaborate; they can innovate together. There's a lot of spontaneity in the way people bump into each other, just a really fun collaborative creative space."
"You can't really can't walk through this space without bumping into people," Goler added.
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"Now that we are spending more time at home, we are noticing the large number of delivery vans and lorries driving through cities," said Netherlands environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, announcing plans to ban all but zero-emission deliveries in 14 cities.
"The agreements we are setting down will ensure that it will be a matter of course that within a few years, supermarket shelves will be stocked, waste will be collected, and packages will arrive on time, yet without any exhaust fumes and CO2 emissions," she added.
She expects 30 cities to announce zero emission urban logistics by this summer. City councils must give four years' notice before imposing bans as part of government plans for emission-free road traffic by 2050. The city bans aim to save 1 megaton of CO2 each year by 2030.
Help to Change
To encourage transport organizations to go carbon-free, the government is offering grants of more than US$5,900 to help businesses buy or lease electric vehicles. There will be additional measures to help small businesses make the change.
The Netherlands claims it is the first country in the world to give its cities the freedom to implement zero-emission zones. Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht already have "milieuzones" where some types of vehicles are banned.
Tilburg, one of the first wave of cities imposing the Dutch ban, will not allow fossil-fuelled vehicles on streets within its outer ring road and plans to roll out a network of city-wide electric vehicle charging stations before the ban comes into effect in 2025.
"Such initiatives are imperative to improve air quality. The transport of the future must be emission-free, sustainable, and clean," said Tilburg city alderman Oscar Dusschooten.
Europe Takes Action
Research by Renault shows that many other European cities are heading in the same direction as the Netherlands, starting with Low Emission Zones of which Germany's "Umweltzone" were pioneers. More than 100 communes in Italy have introduced "Zonas a traffico limitato."
Madrid's "zona de baja emisión" bans diesel vehicles built before 2006 and petrol vehicles from before 2000 from central areas of the city. Barcelona has similar restrictions and the law will require all towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants to follow suit.
Perhaps the most stringent restrictions apply in London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which charges trucks and large vehicles up to US$137 a day to enter the central area if they do not comply with Euro 6 emissions standards. From October, the ULEZ is being expanded.
Cities are responsible for around 75% of CO2 emissions from global final energy use, according to the green thinktank REN21 - and much of these come from transport. Globally, transport accounts for 24% of world CO2 emissions.
The Rise of Online Shopping
Part of the reason for traffic in urban areas is the increase in delivery vehicles, as online shopping continues to grow. Retailer ecommerce sales are expected to pass $5billion in 2022, according to eMarketer.
The World Economic Forum's report The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem, published in January 2020, estimates that e-commerce will increase the number of delivery vehicles on the roads of the world's 100 largest cities by 36% by 2030.
If all those vehicles burn fossil fuels, the report says emissions will increase by 32%. But switching to all-electric delivery vehicles would cut emissions by 30% from current levels as well as reducing costs by 25%, the report says.
Other solutions explored in the report include introducing goods trams to handle deliveries alongside their passenger-carrying counterparts and increased use of parcel lockers to reduce the number of doorstep deliveries.
Reposted with permission from the World Economic Forum.