Glitzy digs don’t always pan out
In the fastpaced tech world, trophy campuses aren’t all they’re cracked up to be
Sun MicrosysSAN FRANCIS CO tems was a high-flying tech titan, seemingly at the peak of its powers, when it moved into a gleaming-new 11-building campus on 57 acres of prime Silicon Valley property in the mid-1990s.
The future seemed limitless — Sun flirted with buying a thenstruggling Apple — and it grew dramatically with sales of computer servers and storage to Web start-ups during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s.
Then the bubble burst in 2000. By 2010, Sun was forced to sell to Oracle for $7.4 billion, a slice of its former valuation.
The lesson of Sun’s Icarus-like fall has not been lost on its current tenant: Facebook, which expanded to the Menlo Park, Calif., site, left Sun’s sign visible on glass doors as a reminder to employees of the risks of becoming comfortable with success.
Such are the potential pitfalls in corporate America: Not every trophy campus is a monument to a company’s success. In fact, it can have just the opposite effect, reflecting a sour turn in fortunes.
The cautionary tale of Sun is a historical side note as Apple, Salesforce and Amazon move into opulent new architectural projects at a time when their businesses are booming and market valuations are soaring to record heights.
Apple Park is “a proof point, if you will, that Apple is untouchable and poised to outlive almost anything,” says Joe Franscella, senior vice president of Bhava Communications, a public relations, marketing and branding agency. “I mean, that building, based on photos I’ve seen, has the same aura as the Pentagon.”
Apple’s 175-acre, space-age architectural marvel, believed to have cost $5 billion to build, just opened its doors — drawing parallels to some of the most iconic corporate headquarters ever and exhibiting the riches of the world’s most-valued company ($800 billion and climbing).
Salesforce is moving into a new, 61-story tower that will be the tallest building in San Francisco to be near its customers and consolidate operations in a vertical, urban campus. The softwareservices company on Saturday opened the 48-story Salesforce Tower Indianapolis, the largest building in Indiana, and it occupies a 41-story building in midtown Manhattan.
Amazon is constructing three giant glass spheres containing an indoor forest in Seattle. And Facebook and Alphabet have tapped top architects Frank Gehry and Bjarke Ingels, respectively, for expansion projects. For Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube, the extended Googleplex would involve public walkway that cuts through a building topped by a glass canopy.
The rise of glitzy tech structures marks a radical departure for an industry that has favored nondescript, low-slung office buildings and left corporate palaces to the likes of banks and oil giants.
Palatial corporate digs aren’t merely paeans to executive ambitions but outsized symbols of a company’s brand and identity, marketing experts say.
French shipping group CMA CGM’s tower in Marseilles is shaped as a ship’s tail. BMW’s Welt exhibition center in Munich resembles a futuristic auto show room. Samsung properties in its native Seoul and San Jose offer sweeping vistas from glass-andsteel towers. Shoe company Adidas’ LACES building is part of a sports-themed corporate headquarters in Bavaria, Germany.
The evolution of tech campuses into showy monuments with perks underscores a shift in the economy to intellectual companies where talented minds require social amenities to collaborate and innovate, says Brad Hinthorne, an architect in Seattle.
“We always thought the campus had so many amenities so it would inspire us to stay longer and work more hours,” says Rick Bakas, a former Nike employee who helped design the Denver Broncos and Oregon Ducks brands. The athletic-wear giant plans an expansion of 3.2 million square feet of stunning office space at its Beaverton, Ore., headquarters by 2018.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ last great product is on vivid display at a 2.8-million-square-foot circular building in Cupertino, Calif., called the Ring — a testament to his vision for a space-age campus. In 2009, Jobs enlisted British architect Norman Foster, designer of the Hearst Tower in Manhattan. Plans were unveiled in 2011.
The curved-glass Ring, centerpiece of Apple Park, will house 12,000 employees and a 1,000- seat Steve Jobs Theater that looks like a MacBook Air.
Apple Park is a wonderland of high-mindedness and cuttingedge design. Its 9,000 trees are drought-tolerant. The Apple Cafe, which can serve as many as 4,000 people at once, has two glass doors four stories high. A 100,000-square-foot fitness center, covered in distressed stone from a quarry in Kansas, has a two-story yoga room. More than 800,000 square feet of solar arrays dot the campus. Notably absent, however, is a child care facility, Quartz reported.
“It captures and reflects the wealth and power of Apple,” says Devin Gharakhanian, an environmental and experience designer who specializes in augmented and virtual reality. “It feels like a Steve Jobs or Walt Disney inspiration, though it also feels like a forced design. It’s as much about an aesthetic creation.”
Apple declined to comment. Foster + Partners had no comment.
There is function beyond the form of Apple’s aesthetic monument: The campus allows Apple to hire more people and have them work close together, tech analysts say.
“I think it’s mostly important ( because) it will finally allow far more of the key people at Apple headquarters to work in the same building rather than being spread all over the valley,” says Jan Dawson, principal analyst at Jackdaw Research. “That’s a vastly underestimated problem at Apple. It’s been running out of space, which has also constrained hiring at a time when it should have been expanding significantly.”
“This was a 100-year decision,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Wired.
Yet tech moves in fast and unpredictable ways. A sudden jolt in the market could hinder the ability of companies to pivot, whether through relocation or innovation, if they are tied to pricey new headquarters. Excite@Home, a high-speed Internet service provider that was the result of a $6.7 billion merger in early 1999, was in the midst of moving into a sparkling new facility in Redwood City, Calif., when the dot-com bubble burst. It shut down in early 2002.
Or there’s the case of Zynga, which sunk millions of dollars into a San Francisco location when its Facebook-centered
Farmville game was the hot thing in games.
But mobile games such as King Digital Entertainment’s Candy
Crush Saga came along, upending the market and plunging Zynga into a prolonged tailspin.
Zynga still occupies its flashy headquarters but last year put it up for sale.
The San Francisco skyline shows the $1 billion Salesforce Tower under construction. When finished, it will be San Francisco’s tallest building.