Most conversations about Massive Tech and sustainability comply with a well-known script: an organization proclaims a carbon pledge, releases an environmental report filled with impressive-sounding numbers, and everybody strikes on. What hardly ever will get mentioned is the messy, unglamorous actuality sitting proper on the middle of all of it: the information server room. That’s precisely the place two design college students determined to start out, and the outcome is without doubt one of the most visually hanging office ideas I’ve seen in years.
Lia Hur and Michell Hur, each from the Savannah School of Artwork and Design, started with an easy query: what do you do with all the warmth that knowledge servers always produce? The reply they arrived at wasn’t purely mechanical. It was spatial, experiential, and genuinely stunning. Their Google Sustainable Headquarters idea received two awards on the European Product Design Award 2025, masking each Architectural and Constructing Design and Inside Design classes, and it’s straightforward to see why.
Designeres: Lia Hur, Michell Hur
The very first thing that strikes you once you have a look at the idea renderings is the ocean. Not metaphorically. The complete design language of the constructing is constructed across the visible world of the deep sea. Curved panoramic screens wrap round rooms exhibiting beluga whales gliding by way of blue water. Kids sit on the ground of an immersive theater-like area, fully surrounded by marine life projected at scale. Within the server hall, the place rack upon rack of {hardware} strains either side of a slim hallway, the ceiling opens up right into a curved display of swimming fish, as if the infrastructure beneath the ocean floor and the ocean itself had in some way merged right into a single area.
It’s an surprising selection, and it really works exactly as a result of it’s surprising. Knowledge facilities and ocean imagery haven’t any apparent connection, till you begin occupied with cooling methods, water utilization, and the thermal logic that governs how these buildings perform. The Hurs don’t clarify the metaphor didactically. They only construct the world and allow you to inhabit it.
The inside language carries this by way of each zone of the constructing. The reception foyer, considered by way of an outsized natural lattice construction that reads like coral or a cross-section of a neural community, options terrazzo-style desks in deep ocean blue and heat picket disc pendants floating overhead. A café break space has a single rounded sq. window framing an underwater manta ray, glowing white towards darkish partitions. A mom’s room has the identical window format, this time exhibiting a humpback whale drifting slowly previous, turning what might have been a purely practical area into one thing quietly meditative.
The workspace pods are the place the idea will get most sculptural. Spherical types lined in dwell moss float by way of an open flooring plan, each glowing from a lit band round its center, like a planet seen from area. Employees tuck themselves inside. The ceiling above them ripples with projected water. It feels much less like an workplace and extra like an ecosystem you occur to work inside.
What I discover most compelling is the part diagram the designers included. Stripped all the way down to its fundamental geometry, the constructing reads as a stacked sequence of layers: a textured structural dome on the prime, a residing inexperienced layer beneath it, a darkish water layer under that, after which human occupation on the base. It’s a quietly radical concept. The constructing isn’t sustainable as a result of it has a inexperienced roof or offsets its emissions. It’s sustainable as a result of it’s organized round pure methods at a structural stage, with warmth, water, and residing materials all functioning collectively as a closed loop.
The outside pulls all of it collectively. A big dome construction sits straight on water, its pores and skin fashioned from interlocking bubble-like cells that glow from inside. Smaller spherical pods float on the floor round it. it below a sky of northern lights, it reads extra like a analysis station on one other planet than a company headquarters.
That’s not a criticism. It’s an indication that Lia and Michell Hur weren’t attempting to design a constructing that appears sustainable. They have been attempting to design one which makes you are feeling what sustainability might really imply, and that’s a a lot more durable factor to do. They pulled it off.
