Silicon Della Valle by Charlie Teasdale

On assignment for Tod’s, photographer Ramak Fazel goes in search of real life in the world capital of technology

For his book Silicon Valley No_ Code Life, Iranian-American photographer Ramak Fazel spent six weeks in Northern California, photographing some of the most culturally, socially and politically freighted places on the planet, from the Facebook campus to the Googleplex and Apple Park, but also many buildings and businesses unknown outside the area, though no less familiar to its inhabitants: Buck’s of Woodside restaurant, the Saddle Room bar in Redwood City, Adult World in Santa Clara.

The 128 images in Fazel’s book were all shot on his Rolleiflex medium format camera. It’s an elegant analogue solution to a digital conundrum: how best to represent life in the cities to the south of San Francisco, places with names to conjure with: Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino? The results, rather than emphasising the smooth, glistening, frictionless wealth of the area, focus instead on the more mundane realities of quotidian existence in Silicon Valley — lonely parking lots, faded fast food joints, low-rent strip malls and condo developments, messy “hacker houses”, featureless meeting rooms, empty scrubland, liminal corporate spaces. It might be the place where they invent the future, but plenty of it appears to be stuck in the past.

The project was originated not by a New York creative director or a Los Angeles gallerist but by Diego Della Valle, chairman of the Italian luxury goods house, Tod’s. “They know everything about us,” pondered Della Valle, “but what do we know about life in Silicon Valley?” How do the inhabitants of the most powerful place on Earth live, he wondered? How do they spend their free time, if they have any?

This was a challenge to Tod’s No_Code project, the brand’s creative think tank, set up to investigate ways in which Italian artisanship can better interact with advanced manufacturing technologies, how the analogue can complement the digital and vice versa. So far, No_Code has produced five forward-thinking shoe designs, with another set for the summer. This book is its first foray into publishing.

“We decided to create a book because we wanted to underline the hybrid nature of Tod’s No_Code,” says Michele Lupi, a former journalist who now glories in the title of men’s collection visionary at Tod’s. “Today, analogue and digital are no longer two clashing worlds. The idea that they represent the ‘old’ and ‘new’ sides of society is really outdated. We wanted to make something that would be physically tangible, something visible on people’s tables.”

“Popular belief suggests that Silicon Valley is a technologically advanced society,” says Fazel. “But you need to search hard to find advanced infrastructure around the valley. This project definitely gave me, and I think the whole team, a renewed understanding of just how ordinary Silicon Valley can appear.” Charlie Teasdale

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Silicon Valley No_Code Life by No_Code Tod’s and Ramak Fazel (Rizzoli) is out now

Left: From the age of around 12 through to his high school years, Steve Jobs lived in this house at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. It was in this garage in 1976 that Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled the first 50 Apple 1 computers

Right: The Gingerbread is one of 18 large-scale foam statues installed on Google’s Android Lawn, near the Googleplex in Mountain View. Introduced in 2010, Gingerbread was the seventh version of the Android mobile operating system

A typical private home in Palo Alto, a Bay Area city attracting some of Silicon Valley’s more senior and affluent workers, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who paid a reported $37m for a cluster of five adjoining houses in the area

Bunk beds are a common fixture in cluttered Silicon Valley ‘hacker houses’, where young techies typically pay high rents to share dormitory-style bedrooms and communal living spaces

In Redwood City, this bar’s rustic architecture and signage speaks to an earlier time when local economies were dominated by cattle ranching, agriculture and mineral mining

The former Yahoo headquarters building in Sunnyvale, California, was acquired in 2017 by Verizon Communications Inc which soon sold it to Google in 2019

Before a San Francisco 49ers’ home game, a pair of engineers ‘hack the pre-game ritual’ with a Whole Foods’ tailgate party, in front of their Tesla

Al fresco dining for employees at the staff cafeteria at the Googleplex in Mountain View

Known by many as ‘The Naughty Place’, the Adult World strip club in Santa Clara was a neighbourhood fixture up until the pandemic in 2020, when its owners announced it would be closing permanently

At the Facebook campus at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, security comes with a half-smile