Android Sculpture Garden
1981 Landings Drive,
Mountain View, California
94043
Google has taken down these sculptures. They may or may not ever return. Hopefully, they are restoring them, as they had seen better days. We will update this article if they ever return.
If the phone you might be reading this on is an Android, then Google, the company that makes the operating system for your phone, assigns a different dessert or sweet treat to each version of the operating system while they work on the software in development. Past operating systems have been codenamed cupcake, gingerbread, jelly bean, and more recently, simply pie. To commemorate each operating system version, Google even has a statue made for each one! The statues are quite big actually, often incorporating their robot Android mascot. All these statues are gathered up in sort of a sculpture garden, located on Google's campus, available for you to go and take a look.
If you do, you'll find a hodge podge of green Android robots along with giant desserts. Initially a lot of the sculptures were simply large versions of the dessert such as a giant cupcake, a large donut, a massive eclair, etc. With their Ice Cream Sandwich code base though at the end of 2011, the statues began to look more like the Android robot as the dessert or with the dessert. For example, the ice cream sandwich is in the shape of the Android robot. The Jelly Bean code base is a jar in the shape of the robot filled with giant jelly beans!
The various sculptures include:
- a giant green Android robot for the operating system in general
- a giant cupcake
- a very big donut
- a massive eclair
- a large cup of frozen yogurt
- an enormous gingerbread man
- a wall of honeycomb with the Android robot
- an ice cream sandwich in the shape of the Android robot
- a jar in the shape of the robot filled with gigantic jelly beans
- a robot made out of massive Kit Kat bars
- the Android robot holding an amazing swirly lollipop
- the robot this time holding a humongous marshmallow
- a giant arch like sculpture which I believe is meant to represent the Nexus One device
Additionally, a few sculptures have been added since I was there, or were or are somewhere else on campus at the time:
- the robot standing on a nougat bar
- the robot as a superhero with an Oreo cookie
- the robot standing with a cherry pie, one slice taken out of it and to robot's right
- a giant 10 statue for Android 10
Many of the statues are made by a company called Themendous located in New Jersey. The statues were originally located on the lawn in front of Building 44, but are now a few blocks away near the Google Visitor Center Beta. From recent pictures I've seen, it looks like some of the statues have seen some wear and some vandalism since I was last there, which is unfortunate.
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First Created: 2020-07-04
Last Edited: 2020-07-04
