The embrace of Nature is all-encompassing on the VMware Campus and calibrated to offer an array of experiences to the users. It is fitting to have the VMware’s Discovery Center, a space to showcase how their products change the world, on this transformative pedestrian campus that has de-institutionalizing the workplace interior and exterior and meshes the human-made into the natural world.

The 15,000 SF visitor’s center is the heart of HTG, a 85,700 SF LEED Platinum office building with PVs on the roof The building follows the campus’ nature theme and serves the growth of this expanding campus.

The design focus of the Discovery Center is a pair of dramatic glass ellipses that serve as product display areas. Surrounded by support spaces, the strong canted forms push together, overlapping, seeming to float in a rectilinear environment. A skylight above the junction of the two obliques lights the core and highlights the shapes coming together, emphasized by metal soffits, and changes in flooring material to create an effect.

The surrounding support spaces, including offices, a café, an auditorium, and a large board room, are flooded with natural light and views to the outdoors. The color palate is urban with heavy influences from the natural environment seen in the warm textures and strategic use of wood and stone.

On the VMware Campus, boundaries remain purposefully ambiguous by the de-institutionalized interior and exterior of the workplace. In inhabiting its individual pieces, the wonder is whether one is inside or outside, a hallmark of West Coast architecture. Such soft delineation of its physical contours is consistently found in the numerous civic episodes where the workforce can find opportunities for chance encounters in a leisurely dimension, bucolic and metropolitan at the same time.

This is the workplace of the 21^st century.