Job Shadow

Google Inc.  Designed by Burgess Design  (www.burgessdesign.net)                                                                                                                                                   

     We were leaded to a tall and marvelous building called Columbia Center to see the interior of the space they are going to design. I was really impressed by the curve shape of the building. The interior space looks very different from the ordinary building and also results in different design problems. As the curve shape goes, the doors and walls need to follow the curve. Besides, there is also a big structure within every floor that also interrupt the space and designers need to think about the solution to deal with it. There is one structure that is painted bright green because they said it was for the technology firm and they wanted to emphasize and take advantage of the structure.
     Then, we have an overview of remodeling project. They showed us a messy structural architecture which has lots of stairs connected to each floor but without placing them logically. Their design problem is to make the first floor more accessible to people and try to increase the usage of it. Therefore, they decided to take off all visible stairs out and add a pleasing stairs to connect the first floor and the second floor. We saw the change they made have significant impact and it did improve the space planning. However, we also learned that the budget play an important role in the design as they indicated that if the design cost too much, they would choose to remodel the necessary parts.