Whimsical Workplace Inspires Google Workers

Then there's the phone call dilemma. Should you use a former ski gondola that has been converted into a private phone booth? Shut yourself inside a blue igloo or giant purple egg? Put the call on a video monitor?

Or just take it outside and walk along a rushing Alpine river?

If you want to tap into the maximum creativity of everyone you hire, Google figures it might just take a whimsical mishmash of colors, shapes, textures, nooks and crannies to do so.

"To be effective in a short innovation cycle, you cannot just be sitting at your desk," explained Matthias Graf, the company spokesman in Zurich.

That explains the pinball, foosball and pool tables, the Wii sports center, the air guitar video game, the massage tables and the aquarium water lounge.

Or the cafe next to the technical center where you can eat, chat, read and play video games while you wait for your computer to be fixed.

Yet this is not dot-com deja vu, when Internet companies wasted gobs of money on outlandish toys before burning through all their cash and firing everyone. The Internet giant worked with a psychologist and design team to interview all 350 employees and incorporated their ideas into a new workspace - yet insisted the new design should not cost more than an ordinary office building.

"Everyone says 'Google is wealthy, you can buy a fancy office.' But we wanted to show what anyone could do with some imagination," Graf said.

The result: Simple, neutral but small individual workspaces with lots of natural light are interspersed with stimulating, brightly colored, wildly original communal spaces. The lack of private offices allowed Google to create vast amounts of communal space - more than 100 different meeting rooms for anywhere from 2 to 200 people.

"It feels good to be here, it feels comfortable," Swiss engineer Patrik Reali said as he took a break to play Star Trek pinball. "There's nice places to retreat and hide if you need to think."

Each floor has a different color and theme. The 5th floor is the history floor, with an old-time library, heavy velvet curtains and overstuffed, second hand chairs. The 4th is the green environment floor, complete with a terrace for eating outdoors. Switzerland is the theme of the third floor, with reinvented gondolas, carpets that look like snow or blue ice and a quirky stuffed penguin mascot.

"Companies often spend a lot of money on expensive things - furniture, lights - that employees don't really care about," said Stefan Camenzind, founder of the architectural and design firm Camenzind Evolution Ltd, which created the Zurich office. "Google was smart to focus on what matters to employees."