A Google corporate campus in Silicon Valley with a roof that looks like a circus tent was one of three U.S. buildings to be named a finalist by an influential architecture publication for its annual global design awards.

Google’s Bay View office complex in Mountain View, California, was shortlisted by Dezeen for its 2023 awards program in the workplace category. In the infrastructure and transportation category, Dezeen shortlisted the Memorial Park Land Bridge and Prairie in Houston. Dezeen also shortlisted an agricultural research facility at the University of California, Riverside in the education category.

Dezeen, based in London, selected 85 projects worldwide as finalists for this year’s awards in residential, hospitality, healthcare, adaptive reuse and other categories. Dezeen was founded in 2006 by architecture critic and journalist Marcus Fairs, who died last year at age 54. The winner in each of the 16 architecture project categories will be announced in November.

The Google building, designed by Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group, is visually striking with its “tent-like roof made up of a system of inward curving panels,” Dezeen said in a description of the office campus.

The roof panels were also designed with an eye toward sustainability as they “were fitted with a combined total of 50,000 silver solar panels,” which Google describes as “dragonskin,” Dezeen said. Combined with a nearby wind farm, about 90% of Google's Bay View campus will be powered by renewable energy sources.

The tent-like roof creates a large open space inside with the roof supported by “slim, white columns.” Windows connect the various segments of the roof, infusing the interior with abundant natural light.

The Bay View campus was not part of a recent round of office sublease listings by Google in Silicon Valley as the online search provider reduces its real estate footprint to cut costs.

The plant research building designed by Perkins & Will at the University of California in Riverside is a two-story building equipped with 16 greenhouses, laboratory space, cold storage and sterilization equipment. Each greenhouse can be adapted to mimic different climate conditions, which a university spokeswoman said “is ideal for entomology research.”

Perkins & Will said on its website that the design “puts science on display — placing the glass greenhouses above a concrete base so that students, faculty, and researchers can see and experience the research happening on campus.”

In Houston, landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz designed an addition to Memorial Park, a 1,500-acre urban public park, that includes a land bridge that connects the northern and southern sections of the park separated by Memorial Drive, a six-lane highway. The land bridge is designed to allow visitors and wildlife to cross the highway and avoid vehicular traffic. The new addition also includes 45 acres of native prairie grassland.

“New vantage points of the downtown and uptown Houston skylines on top of the Land Bridge provide an iconic gathering place for events, sunrise meditation and evening stargazing,” Dezeen said of the design.

Heatherwick Studio won Dezeen's landscape projects prize in 2022 for its design of Little Island, a public park in New York City set on dozens of concrete columns rising from the Hudson River.