Bionic: Moffett Place transforms the conventional Silicon Valley office campus into a continuous landscape of movement, recreation, ecology, and social life. Across 55 acres in Sunnyvale, California, six office buildings and a central amenity building are connected by a highly programmed public realm that operates simultaneously as campus infrastructure, urban habitat, and shared outdoor space.
Bionic approached the landscape as the primary organizing system for the campus. A network of pedestrian paths, planted corridors, open lawns, sports fields, courts, terraces, and gathering spaces creates a continuous ground plane between buildings. Rather than separating circulation, recreation, and landscape into distinct zones, these uses overlap to produce an active sequence of spaces that supports walking, exercise, informal meetings, outdoor work, events, and everyday social interaction.
The landscape is structured by an urban forest. Rows, groves, and clusters of trees define outdoor rooms, frame circulation, shade gathering spaces, and establish a legible spatial order across the large campus. Beneath this canopy, planting draws from the ecological character of the Santa Clara Valley, using native and adaptive species to create a landscape that is resilient, habitat-supportive, and distinctly rooted in place.
Extensive underground utilities, building systems, soil volumes, drainage, and stormwater infrastructure were closely coordinated with planting and public space. Stormwater is collected and treated throughout the site within planted systems that are integrated directly into the campus experience.
Recreation is embedded into the landscape rather than treated as a separate amenity. Sports fields, courts, running and walking routes, lawns, and flexible social spaces form part of the same connected framework, allowing the campus to shift throughout the day between work, movement, play, and gathering.
By combining intensive programming with ecological systems and technical infrastructure, Moffett Place reframes the corporate campus as an integrated urban landscape. What appears as an open and effortless network of gardens, paths, fields, and gathering spaces is in fact a highly engineered ground, one designed to support both human activity and environmental performance.
Landscape architecture: Bionic
Architecture office involved: Woods Bagot
Photo credits: Bionic
Other credits: Sherwood Design Engineers, Civil Engineering
Year completed: 2018
