Before Google, the campus at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway belonged to Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), the company whose workstations rendered the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and powered the visual effects revolution of the 1990s. When SGI downsized and eventually filed for bankruptcy, Google leased and then purchased the campus. The T-rex skeleton -- affectionately named Stan -- was a nod to both SGI's history with dinosaur rendering and Google's own playful corporate culture. The campus has expanded dramatically since then, with Google acquiring surrounding properties and commissioning new buildings, including the futuristic Bay View campus designed by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick.

The Googleplex is less a corporate headquarters than a self-contained village. Free meals are served in dozens of cafeterias and micro-kitchens. There are fitness centers, swimming pools, volleyball courts, nap pods, and laundry facilities. The theory -- refined over two decades -- is that removing every possible friction from an engineer's daily life will maximize the hours they spend thinking about Google's problems. The campus sprawls across Mountain View in a patchwork of buildings connected by walking paths and shuttle routes, employing tens of thousands of people in an area that was once orchards and low-density suburbia.

The Googleplex has become a pilgrimage site for technologists, complete with its own landmarks. The Android lawn statues -- large foam sculptures representing each version of Google's mobile operating system, from Cupcake to the latest release -- stand in a park near the campus. Google's first server rack, built from Lego bricks by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is preserved inside. The campus is also a working laboratory for Google's ambitions beyond search: self-driving cars from Waymo were developed and tested here, quantum computing research takes place in adjacent facilities, and the AI systems that have transformed the company's products were trained on clusters humming in nearby data centers. From the air, the Googleplex looks like a suburban office park. From the ground, it looks like the most influential company town since Detroit.