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Google Expanding into Major Campus on South Lake Union

south-lake-unionThere’s a Silicon Forest and a Silicon Alley — now with Google’s announced expansion into four new buildings and a colossal 607,000 square feet of office space in South Lake Union, not far from Amazon’s new world headquarters, the geo-tags Silicon Lake, Silicon Locks or the Silicon Canal may soon apply.

Whatever you want to call it, the coming Googleplex between Terry Avenue and Fairview Avenue makes this lakeside community a world-class technical hub. Given Google’s penchant for graphical playfulness with its logo, we can just imagine architectural renderings using Amazon’s new biosphere bubbles to spell out the search giant’s name.

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As Seattle Times technology reporter Rachel Lerman points out, “Google is known for the inventive design of its buildings. The buildings on the Kirkland campus include multiple micro-kitchens, nap caves and a large wooden nest. The South Lake Union complex will likely be no exception.”

Other neighbors in the tech nouveau district are Salesforce.com, another fast-growing champion of so-called cloud computing, and five-minutes to the south, Facebook’s new offices have tripled in size in little more than a year.

Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate will manage the new construction which is scheduled to begin in 2017 and be completed in 2019.

As reported by the Times, “Under the South Lake Union plans, Google will occupy six stories in four office buildings. There will be 14,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floors, and two of the buildings will be topped with eight to nine stories of apartments — 151 units in total.”

The new Googleplex will be the new home of Google’s Fremont offices, but the “other” lakefront Google campus in Kirkland will remain on the east side.  Google Kirkland recently doubled in size after an expansion project.

Add Redmond, Renton, Bellevue and Bothell into the mashup, plus two little companies named Boeing and Microsoft, and is there any argument? King County may have to be recognized as the bejeweled crown in all of Techdom. Long live the South Lake Union “Silicon Kingdom!” [24×7]