Facebook Designs Its New Offices |
Posted: September 1, 2012 |
Frank Gehry/Gehry PartnersI read with some amusement the news that Facebook had brought on the architect Frank Gehry to design an expansion to its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. Or more specifically, a new warehouse for engineers at its Menlo Park headquarters. Plans for the Silicon Valley site include a 420,000-square-foot, single-story warehouse topped with a garden that will span the entire roof. A tunnel will connect “Facebook East” to the company’s existing headquarters in the former space of Sun Microsystems, whose more hierarchical floor plan has been demolished to make way for Facebook’s open-plan ethos. (As one British blog so delicately put it, “Facebook moves into Sun Microsystems carcass.”) As Everett Katigbak, Facebook’s environmental design manager, explains, “It will be a large, one-room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse.” Katigbak describes a project that will, for all intents and purposes, not only “resemble” a warehouse but be a warehouse, as it’s to be a single room housing more than 2,800 engineers who clearly don’t subscribe to the research suggesting that open offices “make people less productive and more hostile and anxious.” The project’s budget was not disclosed but is said to be in the same ballpark as similar Silicon Valley sites — which is to say, it’s significant. Relative to architectural commissions made by other tech companies, tapping Gehry can be seen as avant-garde. Apart from Apple’s Steve Jobs, who commissioned a new campus design from Foster & Partners that looks like nothing so much as a giant first generation iPod (others have called it a donut or “retrograde cocoon”), tech titans tend not to be big on architectural expression. With its modest, low-slung buildings and plentiful cafeterias, Google looks like a small liberal arts college; the networking company Cisco Systems, a traditional office park. The choice of Gehry might have been “game-changing” — to use the parlance of the start-up community — two decades ago. Today, it’s a safe bet, representing Facebook’s true transition from rogue start-up to the establishment (no matter how strenuously they might dispute that designation). And doesn’t it seem odd to announce the selection of an often over-budget starchitect the same week your company has lost nearly half its market value? What message does that send to investors? But I digress, I’m supposed to be writing about design here … In fact, I’m a huge fan of a lot of Gehry’s work, from his own amazingly experimental house in Santa Monica, Calif., to the endearing Dancing House in Prague to the transformative Guggenheim Bilbao. (The Experience Music Project in Seattle? Santa Monica Place? Not so much.) Choosing him makes sense for a culture-changing company like Facebook, but it might be losing its edge. Why go for such an established icon? Why not choose a small, unknown firm as “lean and nimble” (to borrow some Valley jargon) as so many of the companies responsible for the currently exploding knowledge-worker economy in the region? Or someone established but more surprising? (They do this for interior spaces buy why not the take the same approach to the stuff visible to the outside world?) Earlier this week, the Golden State Warriors announced they’d tapped Snøhetta for their proposed new coliseum in San Francisco, less than an hour north of Menlo Park. Who knew a basketball franchise would be more architecturally adventurous than a tech company? It’s not wholly surprising: Early adapters in everything from gadgets to sportswear, tech folks often grow strangely conventional when it comes to the built environment. Start-ups may have begun life in a garage or cafe, but it seems ultimately all roads lead to the office park. When Facebook took over the corporate campus of now-defunct Sun Microsystems, it packed double the number of employees in the same space. Pre-Gehry, its most radical design innovation has been to deliberately “un-design” their office interiors. No one (not even Mark Zuckerberg) gets an office, but every employee gets a highly customizable square footage allotment complete with adjustable desk and chair. Earlier this year, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger and I spoke at an event on urban design in San Jose, Calif., hosted by SPUR, the urban planning and policy think tank where I work. When asked what might help make San Jose the true “center of Silicon Valley,” Goldberger made the unorthodox suggestion that instead of commissioning Foster’s corporate campus, Apple should have moved from Cupertino and set up shop in neighboring San Jose, effectively transforming California’s second-largest city into an economic and cultural powerhouse. The local crowd buzzed with excitement at this provocative suggestion, but Apple won’t go urban anytime soon. Nor will Facebook, which could have opted for the same radical move Goldberger put out there for Apple. “We are creating the new urban place to work,” said the Facebook real estate chief John Tenanes when the main campus was occupied, but really the company has chosen to approximate the experience of urbanism rather than the reality of it. Much like a city, the Menlo Park campus has services and amenities — a dry cleaner, a gym, a doctor’s office, places to eat — and awnings. Like a city, there is density — inside, anyway. Where Sun employees got about 270 square feet of their own, Facebook’s get just a very cozy 150. But so very unlike a city, the New Urban-ish campus is populated not by folks from different walks of life but solely by Facebook employees. For all the talk in startup circles of “serendipitous interaction,” it’s not the sort celebrated by Jane Jacobs. There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place, those accessible anchors of community life like bars, farmer’s markets or barber shops that help foster civic engagement and interaction with both regulars and new faces. Yes, it’s stating the obvious, but Facebook workers interact with other Facebook workers. There’s next to nil outside influence to be found on a corporate campus. Indeed, many tech employees (Facebook’s and others) have observed that many of their most meaningful encounters occur not at work but while waiting on city streets for the now-ubiquitous corporate shuttles from San Francisco that take them south to Silicon Valley. When I was editor of the modern architecture magazine Dwell, which launched in 2000, around the time of the first dot-com boom, we expected to see an embrace of radical design as more and more newly minted dot-com millionaires began looking for their starter homes. But I was repeatedly surprised to find that most took up residence in the most traditional-looking (and largest) homes imaginable. (Even Steve Jobs lived in a Tudor.) That hasn’t changed this time around. For all their faith in the future, those earliest of early adapters remained strangely tied to conventional tropes of success. In terms of work environments, there’s been more experimentation, more playing with the possibilities of space. But the decidedly un-inventive office park paradigm has held on with a vengeance. Many companies are abandoning it — like Twitter, which recently set up shop on several floors of the historic Market Square building in San Francisco. Though Twitter and Facebook are both in the business of social media, Twitter seems to have opted for a headquarters strategy better equipped to avoid the seemingly inevitable groupthink that a warehouse of tightly packed engineers might produce. Katigbak speaks of things like whiteboards and snacks as if they were design innovations, but they aren’t. Facebook headquarters are located at One Hacker Way: It’s a shame Facebook couldn’t have expressed that hacker ethos architecturally.
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