As part of a Special Issue in the Architectural Theory Review on the Architecture of Global Governance, this article focuses on Google, a Big Tech company that wields unprecedented influence, including in the realm of governance. Using qualitative content analysis of media of Google’s proposed project for a headquarters in Mountain View, California, the article shows how architects, their utterances and ideas, are staged to construct a targeted narrative of a globally influential company. We argue that it is possible that when discourse is powerful enough, and the media construction is sufficiently convincing, it may not even be necessary to build anymore.
The article is co-authored with Mark Sawyer and Georgia Lindsay of the University of Tasmania. It is open access and available here.