Fans of the Google brand and mythology, as well as the architecturally curious, will be able to check out a new visitors' center at the company's "Gradient Canopy" office complex in Mountain View starting next week.

"We’re excited to announce that we’re opening the Google Visitor Experience at our headquarters in Mountain View," the company said in a blog post. "This new destination will give you the chance to experience Google and our hometown community — from a public cafe and a Google Store to an events space and pop-up shop featuring local businesses. Doors open to the public on October 12, 2023."

Those doors will be at the company's futuristic, circus-tent-like building at 2000 North Shoreline Blvd — a building that was first envisioned back in 2015 by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and London-based Heatherwick Studio, and began construction in 2018.

The design allows for extreme flexibility for the office areas within the main two buildings of the campus, as well as green energy power throughout, with the building's running on solar and wind energy 90 percent of the time.

"The result is a campus where the striking dragonscale solar canopies harvest every photon that hits the buildings; the energy piles store and extract heating and cooling from the ground, and even the naturally beautiful floras are in fact hardworking rootzone gardens that filter and clean the water from the buildings," said Ingels after the complex was completed in early 2022.

Google is promising a few different attractions for tourists and visitors, including the company's first-ever public cafe, and something called The Plaza, which will feature outdoor art, events, and programming. Also in the center will be the first brick and mortar Google Store on the West Coast, for shoppers seeking Google hardware products and shwag.

Presumably, there will also be some kind of tour of the buildings themselves, for the architecture nerds, but that part is unclear.

The opening of the visitors' center continues the company's celebration of its 25th anniversary. Google was founded in September 1998 by then-Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Photo: Iwan Baan via BIG architects