Weird California
Weird California
Weird California - By Joe Parzanese

Android Sculpture Garden

Map 1981 Landings Drive, Mountain View, California 94043

Lollipop
Lollipop

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.

The Android Robot
The Android Robot
Ice Cream Sandwich
Ice Cream Sandwich

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!

Gingerbread
Gingerbread
Kit Kat
Kit Kat
Donut
Donut

The various sculptures include:

Honeycomb
Honeycomb
Marshmallow
Marshmallow
Jelly Bean
Jelly Bean

Additionally, a few sculptures have been added since I was there, or were or are somewhere else on campus at the time:

Froyo
Froyo
Nexus One
Nexus One
Cupcake
Cupcake
Eclair
Eclair

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


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