Technology History | 901 Cherry Avenue, San Bruno — A Video Company Inherited a Clothing Company's Building

The building that houses the world's video archive was designed for a company that sells trousers. Gap commissioned 901 Cherry Avenue as a build-to-suit and William McDonough and Partners delivered it in the late 1990s, on a brief that amounted to making office workers feel they were outdoors. The result has raised floors, operable windows, displacement ventilation and daylight reaching most desks. Its signature is the roof: 70,000 square feet of native grasses and wildflowers, planted in a shallow undulation meant to echo the coastal savannah that used to grow here. That roof does four jobs at once. It slows stormwater off the site, adds thermal mass, protects the waterproof membrane underneath, and damps the noise of aircraft climbing out of San Francisco International a few kilometres east. YouTube came to San Bruno in 2006, the year Google bought it, and Google signed a lease on the Gap building in 2007. Staff moved across over the following months. Nobody drawing a merchandising floorplate was planning for what the building would end up holding, which is roughly how the internet has always treated architecture. The campus has spread outward from it. In November 2023 the company opened two further buildings on Bayhill Drive, immediately adjacent, and the surrounding Bayhill office park is zoned for two decades more of the same. One date belongs in any honest account of this address. On 3 April 2018 a woman entered a courtyard here and opened fire, wounding three people before taking her own life; a fourth was hurt escaping. None of this is open to visitors. The campus is a working office with controlled entry, and the only piece of it the public reliably sees is the sign. That sign is the photograph on this memory: white lettering on a low masonry wall half-covered in ivy, with the curved lip of the green roof rising behind it. It is worth standing there for a second and doing the arithmetic. The company behind that wall began in 2005 in rooms above a pizzeria twenty minutes down the Peninsula, with three people and a weak idea about online dating. Photo: Greg Schechter from San Francisco, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons