The world’s most spectacular offices
From California to London, the tech giants are employing top architects to build spectacular symbols of their immense global power. But these edifices have their critics, says Rowan Moore
We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon. Until we chance on the bars of the playpen and find that there are places we can’t go, and that it is in the gift of the grown-ups on the other side to set the limits to our freedom. We’re talking here of virtual space. But those grown-ups, the tech giants, are also in the business of building physical billion-dollar enclaves for their thousands of employees. Here too they create calibrated lands of fun, wherein staff offer their lives, body and soul, day and night, in return for gyms, Olympicsized pools, climbing walls, basketball courts, hiking trails, massage rooms and hanging gardens, performance venues, amiable art and lovable graphics. They’ve been doing this for a while – what is changing is the scale and extravagance of these places. For the tech giants are now in the same position as great powers in the past – the bankers of the Italian Renaissance, the skyscraper builders of the 20th century, Victorian railway companies – whereby their size and wealth find expression in spectacular architecture.
The tech tycoons have colossal resources. They can have new materials invented, or make old ones perform as never before. They can build the biggest and most expensive workplaces yet seen. They can change cities. Most, though not all, of their new structures are in the gathering of towns, suburbs and small cities that goes by the name of Silicon Valley. There is Apple Park in Cupertino, the new Apple HQ designed by the mighty Foster and Partners: 2.8 million sq ft in size and reportedly costing $5bn, at its centre a mile in circumference, visible from space, a metal and glass circle that is now nearly complete. There are the planned Google headquarters in Mountain View and London by the high-ego, high-reputation pairing of Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick. Facebook has hired the New York office of OMA, the practice founded by Rem Koolhaas, to add to its Frank Gehry-designed complex in Menlo Park, completed in 2015.
The one that commands most attention, and has done since the designs were unveiled in 2011, is the Apple/foster circle, built on a site vacated by the waning empire of Hewlett Packard, the firm that gave the teenage Steve Jobs his first break. According to Wired magazine, the building preoccupied Jobs in his last months. In June 2011, visibly ailing, he appeared in person in front of a star-struck Cupertino City Council, to convince them of its merits. He didn’t have to try too hard. “We’ve had some great architects to work with,” he said, “and we’ve come up with a design that
puts 12,000 people in one building.” The audience gasped. He’d seen “office parks with lots of buildings”, but they “get boring pretty fast”. So he proposed something “a little like a spaceship landed” with a “gorgeous courtyard in the middle”. “It’s a circle and so it’s curved all the way round”, he said, which “as you know if you build things, is not the cheapest way to build something. There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building.” The height would not exceed four storeys – “we want the whole place human-scale”. There would be 6,000 trees on the 150-acre site, selected with the help of a “senior arborist from Stanford who’s very good with indigenous trees around this area”.
When a council member said that “the word spectacular is an understatement”, Jobs didn’t demur. “I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” he said. He batted away requests for a few perks for the neighbourhood – free Wi-fi, opening an Apple store, mitigating the increase in traffic – and in the nicest possible way reminded everyone that “we’re the largest taxpayer in Cupertino, so we’d like to continue to stay here and pay taxes”. If the city asked for too much, in other words, Apple would decamp to a rival municipality. The mayor waved an ipad 2 and said how much his daughter loved it. “Your technologies really make everybody proud,” said another councillor. “Well, thanks,” said Jobs, “we’re proud to be in Cupertino too.” “Thanks,” she gurgled back, like a giddy teenager. The project was approved.
Jobs was, in fact, understating the circle’s exceptionalness. Recently Steven Levy, a journalist for Wired, was let through Apple’s PR palisades to look inside the nearly finished building. He described a high-precision Xanadu, a feel-good Spectre base, on which Foster and his team were assisted by Apple’s famed chief design officer Sir Jonathan Ive. After a drive down a pristine 755ft-long tunnel, clad in specially designed and patented tiles, he discovered a world of whiteness, greenery and silver, with a 100,000 sq ft fitness centre and a café that can serve 4,000 at once, with the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theatre, surmounted by a 165ft-wide glass cylinder, for Apple’s famous product launches, and with a landscape designed to emulate a national park. It is a place where trees have been transplanted from the Mojave Desert, where the extensive glass has been specially treated to achieve exactly the desired level of transparency and whiteness, where a new kind of pizza box that stops the contents going soggy has been invented and patented for the company café. The doorways have perfectly flat thresholds because, according to a construction manager reported by Reuters, “if engineers had to adjust their gait
“The doorways all have perfectly flat thresholds, so that engineers don’t have to adjust their gait when they enter the building”
when entering the building, they risked distraction from their work”. There is a yoga room, reports Levy, that is “covered in stone from just the right quarry in Kansas, that’s been carefully distressed, like a pair of jeans, to make it look like the stone at Jobs’s favourite hotel in Yosemite”. There are the sliding glass doors to the café, four storeys or 85ft high, each weighing 440,000lbs – nearly 200 tons – that open and close with the help of near-noiseless underground mechanisms. Apple Park uses the largest, heaviest single pieces of glass ever installed on a building, with the added complication of being curved. It is certainly a wonder of our age, though to what end is an open question. Ive told Wired the main aims were the connection and collaboration it would allow between employees. For Foster, it is “a beautiful object descended on this verdant, luxurious landscape… a true utopian vision”. One of its aims is to inspire future Apple workers with its perfection and attention to detail, to set a standard for them to follow in their work. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, called it a “100-year decision”.
Yet ever since the design was unveiled, it has provoked scepticism. The architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times called it a “retrograde cocoon”, “doggedly old-fashioned”. As a perfect and excluding piece of modernist geometry, set within lush planting and dependent on large amounts of parking, it looks oddly like a corporate HQ of the 1950s or 1960s. And a circle is a frozen form, hard to modify or augment. At any given point, the relationship to the rest is much the same as at any other point, which seems to work against Ive’s hopes for communication and spontaneity. It is the shape of infinity and eternity, of mausoleums and temples. As for Cook’s 100-year ambition, this seems hubristic – as the decline of Hewlett Packard shows, there is little reason to think any tech firm can last that long, in which case the Apple circle will, like the crumbling art deco skyscrapers of Detroit, be magnificently redundant.
There is another line of criticism, which is that those awed and tax-hungry members of Cupertino City Council didn’t push hard enough for the help that their community needs. If the presence of Apple is mostly an immense boon, it also brings pressure on housing and transport, creating traffic jams and pushing the median price of a home in Cupertino to nearly $2m. Other tech firms have tried harder to address these issues. Shohei Shigematsu, the partner at OMA New York in charge of Facebook’s latest expansion, Willow Campus, says their mission is to “integrate with the community”, to provide “the things that the community desperately wants” – a grocery store, open space, 1,500 homes (of which 15% will be offered at below-market rents), a hotel, residential walks, shopping streets. “Facebook is the perfect company,” Shigematsu says, “their mission is to connect people, and network is a word that is virtual but also physical.” He wants to “undo the corporate fortress-like approach”, though he acknowledges that a vast company will always have secrets and that much of its territory will be out of bounds to the general public. The imagery published so far shows generically pleasant parks and streets, of the kind that well-mannered urbanists have been generating for decades, with none of the surprise signature perversity that you usually get with OMA projects. Shigematsu says he is happy to accept “a certain level of banality” in the appearance – it is the “large-scale thinking” that matters to him.
Google want something else again. After considering various iconic architects – for example, Zaha Hadid – they shotgunned Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels’s practice, BIG, into a marriage. It’s a striking idea, like a billionaire hiring Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears to perform at his sprog’s 18th birthday. Heatherwick and Ingels are both unabashed showmen. Just one of them might be considered ample for any project. At Mountain View, where permission was recently granted to proceed, a huge tent-like roof is proposed, with upward-curving openings – “smileshaped clerestories” – for viewing the sky. Beneath its shelter, on a raised open deck, hundreds if not thousands of Googlers will be doing their stuff. The next level down, a publicly accessible route runs through, part of a programme of engaging with the local community that also includes a “public plaza” for group tai chi and whatever.
If Apple Park seems aloof and extraterrestrial – despite the fact that quite a lot of its landscape is open to the public – Facebook and Google want to engage you. But there are similarities between all these projects, such as the all-embracing nature of their ambitions. Each campus is a self-contained universe where everything – the vegetation, the graphics, the food in the café, the programming of events, the architecture – is determined by the management. They make their own weather. Under the Google tent, or inside the Apple circle, there is little but googleness, or appleness. There is nature, but it is of an abstract, managed kind. There is architecture but, notwithstanding the invention that goes into materials, it finds it hard to shed the quality of computer renderings.
Sometimes tech HQS find themselves in the middle of big cities, rather than the compliant sprawl of Silicon Valley. Amazon has chosen to situate itself in downtown Seattle, where it is believed to occupy between 15% and 20% of the available office space. This allows it to boast that 20% of its 25,000 employees walk to work. To its fairly anodyne assembly of office blocks it has just added the Spheres, an urban Eden Project of interlocking bubbles, where its employees will wander, in Costa Rican temperatures, among tropical forests and waterfalls. At Kings Cross in London, pressure of space has obliged the stacking up of Google’s campus into an 11-storey, million-square-foot structure as long as the Shard is tall. Here the fun and games of the inside – a promenade that ascends past cafés and sports facilities to a rooftop landscape of “headland”, “fields”, “garden” and “plateau” – are compressed into an exterior that takes its cue from the somewhat po-faced regularity of office blocks around it, and from the repeating lines of the railway tracks down one side. The proposed building is one of the more convincing architectural designs so far by either BIG or Heatherwick. It is a decisive structure, unafraid of its scale. But it is still inward-looking, offering a conventional office entrance plus an array of retail units to the street. One could have hoped that the force of Google could have achieved more.
When Microsoft was in its pomp, it was happy to occupy a bland scattering of low buildings on the edge of Seattle. It still does. It is striking that for all its fame, Silicon Valley makes little impression on the visual consciousness of the world – there’s not a strong sense of what it actually looks like. Until now it has lacked landmarks. But that much power and that much money will not always be happy to be unobtrusive. We are only just beginning to see the ways in which it can change the landscape of cities.
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Observer. © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2017.
“Each campus is a self-contained universe where everything – the vegetation, the food in the cafés – is determined by the management”