Google, Spruce Goose 2018

Designers: Sean Madden, Darel Carey, Hueman, Tommii Lim, Emily Mann, Kenton Parker, Trav, Joshua Vides, Kim West, and Michael Murphy, SPMDesign, Los Angeles, California, USA and ZGF., Los Angeles, California, USA
Client: Google, Mountainview, California, USA

The interior aesthetic of the Spruce Goose establishes a more mature and sophisticated environment for Google, while still providing the engaging user experience for which they are known. Art programming was led by art/fabrication consultants SPMDesign in collaboration with the client and ZGF. Complementing the distinctive architectural spirit of the revitalized space, the artwork throughout the Spruce Goose is incredibly diverse and entirely unique to the building. New works were carefully curated to resonate with the overall design narrative  and create a seamless integration of art and architecture, elevating the user experience and completing the transformation of the historic Spruce Goose Hangar into an exceptional new workplace.

Artists Darel Carey, Hueman, Tommii Lim, Emily Mann, Kenton Parker, Trav, Joshua Vides, and Kim West were commissioned to create large-scale original works inspired by the hangar’s aviation history, Google’s own culture, and the multi-faceted spirit of Los Angeles. Their monumental installations create a contemporary link between the Spruce Goose then and now, capturing that same moonshot ethos that drove Howard Hughes and which fuels

Google’s innovations. These extraordinary works are thoughtfully positioned throughout the building, providing an additional orientation device within the vast space, and encouraging users to slow down, stay curious, and engage in moments of whimsical escape.

Among these pieces are a mural by Hueman that wraps three walls, trailing from the second floor to the first, enlivening an open workspace. Hueman‘s gleaming cloudscape is interwoven with folds of red fabric, reminiscent of the billowing capes of soaring superheroes, through which she imagined a nearby installation of 3D-printed golden geese might fly.

The building’s central spine features meeting spaces of various sizes as well as semi-private alcoves. A pair of side-by-side alcoves was customized by artist Joshua Vides in his quintessential style of thick strokes of black paint on white. Vides created cartoonish replicas of imagined spaces from different eras of Howard Hughes’s life—a movie screening room, symbolic of Hughes the film producer, and an engineer’s office (akin to those the hangar would have housed during the construction of the Spruce Goose aircraft) in a nod to Hughes the aeronautical innovator.

Tommii Lim used white acrylic latex against black paint to depict two original works in his striking, minimalist abstract, high-contrast style. A lounge on the ground floor features Lim’s take on the “flying boat” during its one and only take-off, while a second-floor hallway features stacked, directional lines that are layered, angled, and aligned throughout the space; inspired by the varied paths that one takes to soar and grow and take flight in life.

Employing minimalistic use of line, space, light, and color, artist Kenton Parker created one of his signature Starbursts in muted tones of metallic gold. The main body of the Starburst is painted directly onto the four-story wall of the south side of the central spine and can be seen from each level of the new architecture, but not in its entirety. The golden rays extend further to the left and right on the fourth floor, captured within a brief, quiet hallway to a workspace, directly opposite the center of the Starburst. The precision alignment of the rays across layers of space creates an immersive, telescoping effect.

A vibrant mural by Kim West meanders through a fourth floor quadrant. Inspired by the singular flight of the Spruce Goose as depicted in the vintage animated film Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose, West‘s abstracted forest of gold-tipped palm trees and drippy, technicolor blooms forms a dreamy homage to what one might have seen from the air on that day in November 1947.

Notable pieces designed and fabricated by SPMDesign artisans include the flock of golden geese that inspired Hueman and a perception sculpture in the main atrium that was created in collaboration with renowned perceptual artist Michael Murphy. Comprised of 2,800 individually hung chrome spheres, it appears to be an amorphous silver cloud until seen from the sole viewpoint where it reveals itself as the “ghost” of the Spruce Goose.