14 DAY TRIAL // Google has moved to its new headquarters in L.A. The company had three different locations around the area up to this point, but it decided to consolidate them all and house everyone inside one full building.
It has now opened up the space for employees and hosted a party for them and some guests to kick things off.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigos even attended the event, briefly, happy that tech companies are setting up shop in the city and hopeful that Google's example would be picked up by others.
Google moved its employees from three locations in the city of Santa Monica to this new place in Los Angeles, so the Mayor had plenty to be happy about.
Google moved into a rather iconic building initially designed by designed by architect Frank Gehry for the Chiat/Day advertising company. The most striking feature is that its entire front is made up by a huge pair of binoculars standing up right.
The binoculars were created by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, best know for their oversized renditions of everyday objects.
The insides of the binoculars are actually, small, sitting rooms. Very near the entrance there is a hallway filled with Google doodles of the past, a veritable doodle museum.
The place is filled with everything you'd expect a Google office to have, a gym, play spaces, great food and so on. About three quarters of the 500 or so employees are engineers, most of the rest work in sales.
Most of Google's employees, in the US, are housed at the main headquarters, the Googleplex. Google's second biggest place is in New York, where it just acquired a city-block sized building to keep them all.
But it's also got centers in other places around the country, particularly in big or tech-oriented cities. Still the new L.A. location is now one of the biggest for the company.
