Make the workspace a landscape. That was the essential brief that Nvidia put forward to Hood Design Studio, best known as the firm behind the landscape architecture at Crosstown Memphis, the new de Young Museum in San Francisco and the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The A.I. giant (currently valued at over two trillion dollars) selected HDS, led by Walter Hood, in an invited competition to create new office spaces for its Santa Clara headquarters — outdoors. Being able to take your laptop outside might be a year-round perk in perpetually sunny and mild California, but Nvidia sought to introduce something much more substantial than a casual space to accommodate this natural inclination.

“The idea was that they didn’t want a series of areas for employees to take breaks, but instead to think of the open spaces as an extension of the
meeting and working rooms in the buildings,” explains Alma Du Solier, studio director and landscape architect at HDS. Working with Gensler, HDS embraced the challenge fully, and with a childlike sense of fun: The team created a 1.6-hectare landscape featuring two donut-shaped treehouses that connect to the two existing Nvidia buildings (designed by Gensler). The elevated offices are anchored to the ground by a mammoth multi-faceted canopy — covered in translucent solar panels — that touches down with three muscular trunks.

The canopy, which anchors two treehouses to the ground, is covered in photovoltaic panels and filters the sunlight that enters the elevated workspaces.

The canopy reads as a massive feat of engineering (even if it was inspired by the ornate trellises of humble vineyards and gardens), one that visually links the campus’s corporate architecture to its new outdoor realm. Wrapped in wood, the treehouses it both supports and shades are semi-enclosed to mitigate traffic noise and allow employees to communicate with ease. They are subdivided into rooms for small, medium and large working groups, each space set up with “all the connectivity needed for holding a productive meeting outdoors.” Employees can shuffle from one to the other (and to the building interiors) via bridges that zig and zag to evoke a sense of dynamism and movement.

If the treehouses and canopy are the project’s most dramatic gestures, the landscape below presented its biggest logistical challenge. The first floor of each existing building had been raised a half-level above grade to tuck parking below. “As a result, the landscape linking the two buildings is elevated more than a dozen feet above the sidewalk along the adjacent roads,” says Du Solier. The firm tested many options to “create an entrance, a gateway, a barrier, a balcony, a welcoming facade.” It finally decided to integrate the landscape at this elevation with a softscape of trees, draping vines and native grasses on its public face and an open concrete wall that delineates an elegant inclined pathway on the campus side. This solution also “maximized the usable space for employees on
the buildings’ ground level and created a separation from the busy San Tomas Expressway.”

The landscape design takes the shape of a rolling landform that stretches out from beneath the outdoor work realm to merge with a sinuous hardscape in concrete, gravel and cobblestone. Wooden decks outfitted with tables and benches of differing sizes and compositions crop up in various areas; expressive trellises — what the firm refers to as “potato chips” — form shaded arbors around them. Knitting the ensemble together: a dynamic paving pattern that emerged from extending the grid lines of both buildings and intersecting them, which results in rhomboid forms, or “lemons.”

On the ground, Hood Design Studio created a landscape featuring California native plants and trees — including four types of oak — as well as rest areas crafted in wood.

Most evocative, the landform has a corrugated edge that snakes in and out to mimic “a series of spatial eddies.” It’s an idea inspired by the shrublands native to the area. And it features the shrubs and vines (“from the manzanita to the California grapevine”), ornamental grasses and sedges that are part and parcel of the landscape here. Four types of oak native to California complete the scheme. If Nvidia’s technology heralds the future, this outdoor workspace keeps its employees connected to the ground — and to actual, rather than augmented, reality. Nothing feels artificial about this intelligent treehouse campus.