Working and living in Mars Science City will allow us to gain experience with climate control, safety, quality of construction, and resilience of human-made ecosystems that will be invaluable when we finally go to Mars and to our work on Earth. Part academic, part commercial, part exhibition, it will act as a Martian embassy on Earth &#; the first foothold of our neighbor planet on Terran soil.

From the street level, a series of walls are pulled open for visitors to enter the commercial spaces from the north and south end of the buildings, while professionals enter from the front plaza into the daylight-filled lobby. Once inside, the linearity of the building façade continues horizontally: the pixel landscape of the stone planter boxes is in the same dimensions and pattern as the ripples of the building envelope.

The new OPPO R&D Headquarters, or O-Tower, resolves these competing requirements by translating a traditional office slab with the perfect depth for access to daylight into a cylindrical courtyard building that is compact yet also providing large, contiguous floor area. Pushing down the southern edge of the building to the ground minimizes the external surface area of the more solar exposed façade while maximizing views out from the inward façade, which is in turn self-shaded from solar gain by the geometry of the tower. The massing is a manifestation of a building form optimized to reduce energy use and maximize access to natural light.

BIG&#;s design for the new ground up building is rooted in the local character of the area, taking advantage of the contextually defined building envelope while creating continuously cascading work environments that will connect Googlers across multiple floors. By opening up the ground floor and activating the roofscape, the light and airy workspaces are sandwiched between the terraced gardens on the roof, and market halls, auditoria and shops on the ground.

From the street, the urban façade encloses the parking. Since the parking is outdoor and naturally ventilated, the façade is perforated to let it “breathe.” By perforating the traditional aluminum plates in six different sizes, the façade creates a rasterized image of Mount Everest. What appears at close to be a pattern of transparency and opacity becomes a crystal clear image at a distance. Façade as artwork.