Google's new 'landscraper' will be as long as a super-tall skyscraper is high — and it could be the next big building trend

When complete, Google's new London headquarters will measure longer than the Shard — the tallest skyscraper in the United Kingdom — is tall. The Shard measures 1,016 feet tall. Google's London headquarters is similar in size, but flipped on its side at 1,100 feet long.

The building's architects — Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studios — call it a "landscraper," meaning it gains most of its size by stretching horizontally rather than vertically.

Google's landscraper could be the first of its kind in the world. But futurist Amy Webb expects landscrapers to become more mainstream over the next 20 years in the United States.

"Landscrapers will create entirely new city footprints that we just haven't seen yet in the US, and could make life easier and more realistic," said Webb, who identifies socioeconomic, geopolitical, and business trends based on quantitative data. 

Here's what we can expect from the landscrapers of the future.

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Four major trends point toward landscrapers, Webb said.

The first is a growing migration from America's densest centers, like New York City and San Francisco, to cities with more undeveloped land, like Austin, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona. Webb predicts that landscrapers will thrive in metros with more sprawl, since there will be more room to build them.

Source: The United States Census

"We will be freed to locate new economic centers and expand outward, not upward," she said. "There's no reason that other cities — in what most people would consider flyover states — now, in 2017, can't decide that, by 2030, we are going to become America's hub for X, which could be bio-tech, agriculture, genome editing, etc."

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