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.
“Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together,” Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg wrote last March about the company’s new HQ and rooftop garden. “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.” Photo credit: Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook
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.
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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.
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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.