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A team of master planners, including architecture studio HOK, has released plans for an office and research complex located within the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley designed to “expand the frontiers of knowledge”.
The project comprises 1.4 million square feet of office and research space and features University of California Berkley, developer SKS Partners, architecture studio HOK and landscape architecture studio Field Operations among its master planners.
Planned for a wedge-shaped plot of land at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Berkeley Space Center will include a number of low-rise buildings clad in glass as well as open space.
It will be adjacent to Moffett Federal Airfield and Hangar One, a massive dirigible hangar from the 1930s now owned by Google.
The glass-clad buildings on the site will be dedicated to research and retail, with some residential properties noted on the initial master plan.
At the centre of the complex will be a circular green space lined with a walkway covered with a perforated canopy, and a number of other green spaces have been planned for the site, according to the team.
“Berkeley Space Center would be designed from the ground up to foster a collaborative environment with the critical mass and infrastructure needed to expand the frontiers of knowledge and develop tomorrow’s defining technologies,” said the team.
The centre would support research in aeronautics, computing and climate science.
The team said the construction of the facility itself also represents an occasion to explore innovation.
“[It’s] an opportunity to redefine how large-scale developments are designed, constructed and managed not just from the ground up, but from the underground up,” said the team.
“The grounds and the buildings would serve as a testbed to pioneer and advance novel low-carbon design and construction practices,” continued the co-planners.
Such practices include solar power, on-site stormwater retention, and investment in the site’s phytoremediation, a process by which the site’s landscape development will “heal groundwater aquifers”, according to the team.
Federal aeronautics research has been operated at the Ames site since the late 1930s, originally under the preview of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and was absorbed into NASA after its creation in 1958.
HOK was founded in 1955 and has other high-profile Silicon Valley projects in the works including a campus for technology company Apple.
It recently unveiled its design for the Penn Station renovation in New York City, which HOK is designing together with PAU.
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