Check out Nvidia’s new polygon headquarters from the air

Check out Nvidia’s new polygon headquarters from the air


 

Check out Nvidia’s new polygon headquarters from the air

 

Yes, Apple’s under-construction campus in Cupertino is the belle of the campus construction ball right now, what with weekly drone flyover updates getting covered breathlessly by the tech press.

But it’s not the only eye-popping corporate headquarters underway. Our friends at the 111th Aerial & Architectural Photography & Video sent over this shot last week.

It’s Nvidia’s new campus at San Tomas Expressway and Walsh Avenue in Santa Clara. The stats? About 500,000 square feet and just two stories, giving it some of the largest floor plates around outside of Facebook’s 430,000-square-foot single room in Menlo Park. (Tech company execs prize big floors because they believe they can lead to more collaboration and innovation when everyone is together.)

It’s been a while since we last wrote about this project — more than year, since before site demolition began in August 2015. The 111th’s image gives a good look at the undulating roof, which is made of triangular panels. The triangle theme, which is also exhibited in the building’s footprint, symbolizes the basic element of computer graphics: the polygon.

 

It looks like the roof panels includ e numerous triangular skylights; the original design, back in 2013, showed a much larger clear roof canopy. It now appears as though Nvidia is taking a different approach to letting in natural light.

“The reduction in skylights was the result of a number of studies which concluded that we would get plenty of light from a smaller number,” wrote Jack Dahlgren of Nvidia, in an email. “We used a tool we developed internally (IRAY) to do ray tracing and simulations to envision the interiors with the skylights. We have enhanced it to produce VR images which we continue to use to refine the interior layout.”

Nvidia’s general contractor is Devcon Construction Inc. Gensler is the project architect. Tom Leader Studio is on landscape-architect duty; Sares Regis Group of Northern California is the development consultant.

Nvidia has entitlements for another, identical 500,000-square-foot building along Central Expressway, just north of the new building. It’s unclear when or if Nvidia will start work on that one.

There seems to be something about unique roof lines these days in Silicon Valley. In Mountain View, Google wants to build tent-like glass canopies over its new buildings there.

 

The image, taken on August 17, shows progress at Nvidia's new headquarters campus site in Santa Clara.