YouTube Office

A Space for Big Ideas

A dated office building becomes a creative hub for a digital media pioneer.

Where Creativity Flows

To keep pace with its rapid growth, YouTube asked JENSEN to transform a dated, 100,000-square-foot office building into an energizing extension of its campus. JENSEN embraced YouTube’s creative, forward-looking vision—taking the dynamism of video to an architectural scale, and introducing portals and places of connection. Flexible, open workspaces fill two upper floors, while a hub of ground level meeting rooms and amenities bring everyone together.

Color Cues

Art, color, and pathways animate the building in unexpected ways. Stairs and amenities are located to prompt a flow of movement while large openings cut into the floor plates reveal new vistas. Within these openings, collaborator Office of Things introduced a frieze of fabric-wrapped forms and digital arrays, uniting the two levels of workspace with vivid colors and a soothing, digital stream. These alluring hues extend to the walls, helping people find their way, while super-graphic figures, the work of artist Buckley, march through the building, creating moments of discovery and delight.

Strength and Beauty

The outdated building needed a full array of improvements, and after detailed analysis the client opted for a more advanced structural system employing seismic dampers—building-sized shock absorbers that help lessen the force of an earthquake. Formidable and dramatic, the dampers became a design element—painted to match—and their use let most of the windows remain unobstructed, so natural light flows in from all directions.

Just Right

With a rapidly evolving company, the optimal mix of meeting rooms, amenities, and work settings can be elusive. To zero in on an answer, the team looked at operational data to assess the right sizes, ratios and locations for meeting rooms, and considered how amenities aggregate both through the building and across the campus. A cafe, meeting rooms, and a “plaza” of casual seating fill the ground floor. The plaza merges with the basement level below, where fitness and wellness are the theme.