First concept drawing of Google’s built-from-scratch Googleplex

It doesn’t have the elegant simplicity of the spaceship campus that Apple has planned for 2016, but the plans for the new Googleplex are hi-tech enough to keep geeks picking sides when it comes to design innovations.

This project isn’t just visually stunning from an architectural perspective. As Vanity Fair points out, the ideas themselves are groundbreaking:

What is really striking about this project, however, isn’t what the architecture will look like, about which renderings can show only so much anyway. It’s the way in which Google decided what it wanted and how it conveyed this to its architects. Google is, as just about everyone in the world now knows, the most voracious accumulator of data on the planet. When it decided to build a building, it did what it did best, which was to gather data. Google studied, and tried to quantify, everything about how its employees work, about what kind of spaces they wanted, about how much it mattered for certain groups to be near certain other groups, and so forth.

Both Apple’s and Google’s planned buildings look amazing, but at the end of the day it isn’t what the buildings look like on the outside or even on the inside, but rather the brains that walk in and out of the buildings. Whatever it takes to inspire the next great gadgets, we’re all for it.