When Steve Jobspresentedthe initial design for his donut - comparable headquarters to the Cupertino City Council , in 2011 , he described the building as a reaction against suburban office commons . “ We ’ve come up with a design that puts 12,000 people in one building ; which sound a bit odd , ” he said . “ But we ’ve see these office parks with a lot of buildings , and they get middling boring jolly fast . We ’d wish to do something good . ” The question , though , is better for whom ?
It ’s hard to argue with Jobs ’ logic . And very few people did — despite some grumblings about traffic , motorcycle lane , and free Wi - Fi , Apple ’s new Foster and Partners’-designed headquarters was met with blessing from the surrounding biotic community . But from an urban position , the plan is n’t all that different than those spot parks Jobs claimed to avoid . The $ 3 billion construction will be segregated from the community around it by blanket swathes of verdure and parking . The only evidence of Apple the vicinity is likely to see ? The traffic . “ It is not Apple ’s job to be the place - maker for Silicon Valley , ” said critic Lydia Lee in anop - ed . “ But for such a strong champion of good aim , it ’s disappointing that it could n’t limit its sights a little eminent . ”
And Apple is n’t alone . Nvidia , the GPU manufacturing behemoth , is also plan a new headquarters . design by Gensler , the edifice pull its central metaphor from the objective it cook up . “ Taking a cue from potato chip design , where the connections for information flow are designed first , the design of each of the two floor plates is centered around how hoi polloi move,”explainedarchitect Hao Ko , “ maximizing the opportunities to connect and enhance collaboration . ” The musical theme is to increase spontaneous discharge - ins between workers — but on the outside , the construction become away from its neighbors , shielded from the hem in streetscape by a thin , faceted hillocks . Meanwhile , the pattern for Amazon ’s newly free Seattle headquarters would quarantine worker inside of a real - world Biodome ; though as an urban marriage proposal , the plan stimulate solid concessions to street - level public amenity .
The isolationist bent has articulate itself in other ways , too — most notably , maybe , through the secret jitney system that has rebound up between San Francisco and Silicon Valley . The service has boomed , with companies like Google charter busses lend workers to and from their homes in quiet , melodic line - conditioned , Wi - Fi - enabled style . The system is so pervasive , in fact , that it ’s start to change the urban fabric of the neighborhoods it stops in : real estate Price near stop are skyrocketing , and hot new eating place are clustering around them , as well . A strict segregation between public and private transit is emerging .
Silicon Valley develop out of the promise of neoliberal San Francisco in the 1970s — and it still bears that fingerprint in its corporate sloganeering , which is full of metaphors about connecting mass and make a better forcible world through digital technology . But when it comes to participation in the urban milieu , most technical school company maintain their aloofness . To take over a phrase from the seminal 1995 essay , The Californian Ideology , this paradox issue from the collision of “ the loose - wheel purport of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies . ” In a recentNew Yorkerarticle about the account of social innovation in Silicon Valley , George Packer summed it up thusly :
The technology industry , by sequestering itself from the community it inhabits , has transformed the Bay Area without being changed by it — in a good sense , without getting its hands dirty … Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency . But it has footling to say about larger issues of justice and fairness , unless you think that political problem are bugs that can be pay off by engineering rather than central battle of pastime and note value .
On the one hand , troupe are interested in using architecture to push social fundamental interaction and community of interests amongst their employee . On the other handwriting , they ’re not as concerned in court interaction between their employee and the community around them .
The tech world in New York is develop in parallel to its heavy brother , most notably with a massive technical school “ campus ” in one of the most isolated voice of the city : Roosevelt Island , a thin strip of land in the middle of the East River . There , the city is partner with Cornell University to work up a 2.1 million square foot community where students and technical school workers can live and work . It is poised to become , as some call it , our own Silicon Island . “ That way of suppose about the city , that these are the parts of the urban center that count , that these are the percentage where creativity is happening , that you’re able to map out it , and make it the equivalent of a bus line , ” order Lange , “ is really disturbing . ”
Historically , the process of segregating urban place using transit or computer architecture has taken shoes for socioeconomic reasonableness . In this type , it ’s being done because of the popular notion that nurture “ innovation ” amongst superb young minds is a topic of choreograph the perfect , close - loop work environs . This is a permeating construct in America , and has been since the 1950s . Brilliant piece of work , the thinking go , happen in spaces that advance familiarity and interaction between employees .
Ironically , though , that is n’t always the case . One of the most storied conflicting tale comes fromBuilding 20 , the temporary wooden craphole — for deficiency of a better news — that MIT built during World War II . The construction finish up housing all of MIT ’s misfit programs later on , and it was so poorly designed that research worker from dissimilar departments were forever forced to interact with each other . Building 20 end up producing some of the most important piece of work of the post - War era — and not because it sequestered its indweller in aseptic campus . Rather , it forced them to adapt to the conditions at hand — and to each other — the same room cities do . New York City is Building 20 , at the urban scale . It should n’t demand to ramp up an island to house its tech community .
The counterpoint to the broad urban strategy of edifice isolated “ campuses ? ” Building new billet right in the urban fabric , like Facebookis doinghere in New York . On June 3rd , we learned that the company is planning to install its NYC engineering team in a new two - level Cooper Square office , designed by Frank Gehry — the architect of their planned Menlo Park edifice . “ It will share many of the feature of our headquarters , but will be clearly Big Apple in design and speak to the unequaled experience of working in a place like Manhattan , ” said website director Serkan Piantino . For example , access to the culture and residential district in downhearted Manhattan , and fringe benefit like gymnasium memberships that will keep employee engage around the office after work . It seems simple-minded — and it is — but companies like Facebook have the power to get incredible economical and cultural bodily process to a locality . For exemplar , heaps of companies like MakerBot and Etsy are drop anchor the so - calledTech Trianglein business district Brooklyn — bring thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic growth to the area .
On the leftover coast , a number of communities are doing the same thing — choosing to ride out in San Francisco , rather than building endure - alone offices . For deterrent example , Spotify recentlyannouncedplans to exposit into an office in the Warfield Building , which houses the famed music venue , in Central Market . Twitter and Zendesk , too , have prefer to invest in San Francisco proper .
Yet the benefit of keeping your employee within a closed electrical circuit environment are clear — so it ’s unlikely that we ’ll see company abandon the scheme altogether . And while it ’s alluring to characterize this as a young phase angle in the life of American city , in realness , the interest of companies have always driven Modern growth . Except these days , companies are n’t just constructing buildings — they’re acting as designers , planners , and policy - makers of entire neighborhoods , too .
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