Most conversations about Big Tech and sustainability follow a familiar script: a company announces a carbon pledge, releases an environmental report full of impressive-sounding numbers, and everyone moves on. What rarely gets discussed is the messy, unglamorous reality sitting right at the center of it all: the data server room. That’s exactly where two design students decided to start, and the result is one of the most visually striking workplace concepts I’ve seen in years.
Lia Hur and Michell Hur, both from the Savannah College of Art and Design, began with a straightforward question: what do you do with all the heat that data servers constantly produce? The answer they arrived at wasn’t purely mechanical. It was spatial, experiential, and genuinely beautiful. Their Google Sustainable Headquarters concept won two awards at the European Product Design Award 2025, covering both Architectural and Building Design and Interior Design categories, and it’s easy to see why.
Designeres: Lia Hur, Michell Hur
The first thing that strikes you when you look at the concept renderings is the ocean. Not metaphorically. The entire design language of the building is built around the visual world of the deep sea. Curved panoramic screens wrap around rooms showing beluga whales gliding through blue water. Children sit on the floor of an immersive theater-like space, completely surrounded by marine life projected at scale. In the server corridor, where rack upon rack of hardware lines both sides of a narrow hallway, the ceiling opens up into a curved screen of swimming fish, as if the infrastructure beneath the ocean surface and the ocean itself had somehow merged into a single space.
It’s an unexpected choice, and it works precisely because it’s unexpected. Data centers and ocean imagery have no obvious connection, until you start thinking about cooling systems, water usage, and the thermal logic that governs how these buildings function. The Hurs don’t explain the metaphor didactically. They just build the world and let you inhabit it.
The interior language carries this through every zone of the building. The reception lobby, viewed through an oversized organic lattice structure that reads like coral or a cross-section of a neural network, features terrazzo-style desks in deep ocean blue and warm wooden disc pendants floating overhead. A café break area has a single rounded square window framing an underwater manta ray, glowing white against dark walls. A mother’s room has the same window format, this time showing a humpback whale drifting slowly past, turning what could have been a purely functional space into something quietly meditative.
The workspace pods are where the concept gets most sculptural. Spherical forms covered in live moss float through an open floor plan, each one glowing from a lit band around its middle, like a planet seen from space. Workers tuck themselves inside. The ceiling above them ripples with projected water. It feels less like an office and more like an ecosystem you happen to work inside.
What I find most compelling is the section diagram the designers included. Stripped down to its basic geometry, the building reads as a stacked series of layers: a textured structural dome at the top, a living green layer beneath it, a dark water layer below that, and then human occupation at the base. It’s a quietly radical idea. The building isn’t sustainable because it has a green roof or offsets its emissions. It’s sustainable because it’s organized around natural systems at a structural level, with heat, water, and living material all functioning together as a closed loop.
The exterior pulls all of it together. A large dome structure sits directly on water, its skin formed from interlocking bubble-like cells that glow from within. Smaller spherical pods float on the surface around it. Looking at it under a sky of northern lights, it reads more like a research station on another planet than a corporate headquarters.
That’s not a criticism. It’s a sign that Lia and Michell Hur weren’t trying to design a building that looks sustainable. They were trying to design one that makes you feel what sustainability could actually mean, and that’s a much harder thing to do. They pulled it off.
The post What If Google’s Server Heat Became Its Most Prominent Design Feature? first appeared on Yanko Design.
