by Lucie Greene
These brand temples are built with no expense spared and are an expression of their owners’ maturity and might. They’re conceived as elegant statements of corporate identity, but they are also symbols of the future—and therefore are revealing in their execution, but also in the fact that they exist at all. They symbolize tech’s enlarged ambition.
Each building uses the latest in techniques and sustainable technology as they give body to a new philosophy for work and innovation. In their size and scope, many of these also serve as mini-townships—Amazon’s new geodesic domes are being aligned with Seattle’s Space Needle as a potential tourist attraction. Others get pitched as new model communities.
“There’s this rising understanding that the built environment is like hardware. Led by Apple, it coincides with other Silicon Valley companies starting to build hardware,” observes Ryan Mullenix, partner at architecture firm NBBJ, which designed new headquarters for both Samsung and Amazon. “Architecture is becoming product design on a grand scale. The space and experience in there is inherently tied to who that company is.”
All these projects are a departure from the philosophy of Silicon Valley, in which companies historically—and intentionally—inhabited bland office parks, where they could expand and contract, flexible according to company fortunes. To do anything so visible and indelible goes against everything Silicon Valley companies have stood for. Adaptability, shrinking, growing has been key to Silicon Valley’s successful ecosystem. But, like Thiel’s quest for immortality, Silicon Valley’s ambitions are now bigger than its unremarkable office blocks.
“Silicon Valley companies have thrived on extremely flexible space, so that’s why the office park dominates here,” says Louise A. Mozingo, professor of architecture and environmental planning and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. “You grow, you shrink. You retreat, retract, and regroup, or retreat and disappear. That suited the Silicon Valley economic cycle extremely well. Investing in large, custom-made buildings that can’t be easily repurposed is unprecedented.”
Mozingo’s office is situated in a 1960s Brutalist Wurster building on the Berkeley campus. She has spent years observing the Valley’s evolution. A petite, bobbed, and bespectacled character, she’s the antithesis of a Silicon Valley jock, but her words are sharply delivered. “One of the huge issues with these massive investments is that nobody’s ever going to move into that building. How do you repurpose such a building?” she says. “The Facebook building is always going to be identified with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, as opposed to these much more anonymous buildings elsewhere in the Valley. These new designs are very costly to maintain. You need a fleet of people and continuing investment in the building. It’s interesting when you relate it to companies on the East Coast, old industrial and insurance companies: Connecticut General, the Bell Labs building, American Can, Union Carbide, of the 1950s to 1970s. They built these huge white elephants that nobody now knows what to do with. I think this is Silicon Valley’s Versailles moment.”
This trend sits amid a wider move by Silicon Valley companies to elevate their design cues, shedding the thrown-together logos of their formative years with more sophisticated, grown-up design aesthetics, defining their brands for the long haul with more rounded personas.
What’s clear is they are now trying to leave their mark.
Silicon Versailles
Drive up to the Googleplex in Mountain View and crowds are taking photographs against the lime-green Android statue. The grasses. The primary colors. The glistening corporate box buildings. There’s a sculpture park with giant toys, where each plastic statue represents code names for versions of Google’s Android mobile operating system, all of which are named after desserts and sweet treats, and are giant, indistinguishable, cartoonish. There’s a gift shop selling merchandise, T-shirts, pens. It’s overrun with eager tourists.
A major addition is Google’s forthcoming Charleston East headquarters designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels from the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and London-based designer Thomas Heatherwick of Heatherwick Studio. There will be pavilions. The roof will be made of curved metal squares, including “photovoltaic solar panels” and “smile-shaped clerestories” to bring spaces direct, indirect, and diffused natural light. All the language is like that of a resort.
The designs serve as a mood board for Google’s template of utopia, blurring the lines between nature and buildings—bike paths, lush gardens, wood-and-rope bridges across streams, owl habitats, cafés, and, no doubt, workers enjoying yoga sessions beneath the planned sun-drenched, soaring, transparent canopy.
Facebook’s recently expanded headquarters in Menlo Park is a bit like a Disney village—similarly vast and tourist-frequented. The 430,000-square-foot office was designed by Frank Gehry, who said his design facilitates collaboration and “did not impose itself on their open and transparent culture.” In just three years the building was designed and constructed from metal, concrete, and glass. About 2,800 employees inhabit the space, essentially one large room, known as MPK20. A 3.5-hectare rooftop park features a walking trail, a coffee stand, and over 400 trees. Mark Zuckerberg, in intended egalitarian style, has placed his glass-box office in the middle of the building.
“The building itself is pretty simple and isn’t fancy. That’s on purpose,” Zuckerberg has said. “We want our space to feel like a work in progress. When you enter our buildings, we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world.”
Amazon’s Seattle campus, less famous, is fully integrated into the urban landscape. The company’s headquarters buildings are set across a few blocks in the South Lake Union area and retain the feeling of being in a normal urban center, with retail, roads, cafés, and farmers’ markets, leased to curated tenants, on the road below. But everything from the first floor up is office space. It’s effectively an Amazon neighborhood. Visit the farmers market. The local store. Brewhouse. Bike park. It all simulates the feeling of a town, but it’s not. It’s Amazon.
Amazon recently commissioned tech architecture favorite NBBJ to extend its headquarters in Seattle to include giant glass biodomes filled with plants. A new 3.3-million-square-foot complex has three connected biospheres attached to a 500-foot office tower. The domes feature 40,000 plants from 300 species from 30 countries, including carnivorous pitcher plants, exotic philodendrons, and orchids from Ecuador. Suspension bridges inside the domes allow employees to enjoy the greenery, and there are meeting spaces resembling bird nests perched among the trees. Amazon has employed a full-time horticulturalist. The belief is that the connection to nature will boost productivity and innovation, and because some species are rare, there is also a conservation aspect to the project.
More recently, Amazon has invited cities to launch competing bids to play host its second U.S. headquarters. The $5 billion project will add 50,000 jobs to the city that lands it. The bids, as cities are pitted against each other, came with offers of substantial tax breaks. In fact, Chicago offered to redirect 50 to 100 percent of Amazon employees’ income taxes back to Amazon. Newark reportedly offered Amazon up to $7 billion in tax breaks. Many pundits question the real benefits of offering such deals to corporations like Amazon, arguing that it takes much-needed tax income away from local resources such as infrastructure, housing, and education. It also creates more demand for these services as workers and other sought-after talent flock to a new employment hub.
Perhaps the most ambitious of all Silicon Valley temples is Apple’s new ring-shaped headquarters. The Infinite Loop, a gigantic circular “spaceship” made with continuous curved glass at a cost of $5 billion, is the most expensive headquarters ever. Designed by Norman Foster, it incorporates meadows and forests. It covers 176 acres and features a 100,000-square-foot fitness center and a giant subterranean auditorium, entered via a glass pavilion topped by a futuristic saucer. It’s described by many as the swan song of the late Steve Jobs, his final project to
be approved by the Cupertino City Council.
Silicon Valley is also remaking the landscape by dipping its toe into the altogether more ambitious area of city planning and urban development. After all, if it can design a smart campus, why not a city?
In 2016, Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup accelerator (which helped launch Airbnb and Dropbox), announced a “new cities” initiative to build cities from scratch, using China’s Shenzhen and other new mega-cities as its inspiration.
Facebook, in the style of company towns from the Victorian era, is building Willow Village on a fifty-nine-acre site near its Menlo Park headquarters, with worker houses and low-income housing, drug and grocery stores and a cultural center. It’s being lauded as Facebook’s first step into town planning. Facebook will build bike paths and has the ambition to refresh the railway line running alongside the site.
Google’s smart-city spinoff company, Sidewalk Labs, focused on technology to rethink how cities could work and be designed better. Sidewalk Labs announced in October 2016 that it was partnering with Transportation for America to help sixteen cities better prepare themselves for inventions like self-driving cars and ride sharing. Sidewalk Labs also announced its most large-scale project to date, a futuristic vision for a twelve-acre chunk of the lakefront in Toronto, Canada. The plan, envisioned for Quayside in the city’s east end, is a data-oriented high-tech neighborhood that will collect data on air quality and water use.
Though this too can be read as ghoulish. Already in London and New York concerns have arisen about Link hubs appearing in place of phone booths, supported by Alphabet-backed Sidewalk Labs. They offer charging and wi-fi but also carry cameras and sensors, creating privacy concerns.
All of these initiatives will be indicative of how Silicon Valley might progress in a civic role. The campuses—their attributes, successes, their failings and claims—reflect the vision and ambition Silicon Valley companies hold for their products and services in the future. When carefully examined, these edifices, and the visions they embody, house both magnificence and imperfection. Within their elegance are significant holes and demons. Within the claims and headlines, there are also falsehoods. Beyond the idyll, there is also creepiness. After all, sensors around cities might be great for recording real-time weather and creating traffic alerts, but they are another form of surveillance. A building itself might run sustainably, but it’s still brand-new, built from scratch using new materials. A campus may technically be porous and open to the community, but when it’s set outside of an urban center, with no clear thoroughfares or communal spaces, it isn’t really. Like the hipster coffee joints rapidly being placed inside suburban headquarters to simulate urban life, in many cases it’s a veneer.
The Rise and Rise and Rise
I’ve had a front-row seat to Silicon Valley’s expansion, first as a journalist and later as a futurist for London-based consultancy The Future Laboratory and more recently J. Walter Thompson. My role for the past decade has been to present a vision of what’s to come. Futurism is part social science, part journalism, and part scenario planning. It’s done by cross-referencing various types of research, like connecting dots on a board, looking for patterns of change as they emerge.
My team looks at data. We interview people (asking teens what they think of soda, pop stars, and the world). We conduct surveys. We analyze trends. We look at subcultures, design, and packaging. We monitor social media and consult heads of industry and academics.
I’m in the business of forecasting mindset and desire. My focus is on understanding consumers and how the world around them is changing and how that might affect the way they live, what they buy, and what their aspirations are. As the Silicon Valley companies radically alter our lives, I have been examining how we, the consumers of their wares, view the companies and the changes they are igniting and implementing at exponentially faster rates. (What brands used to plan for in ten years happens in five. In fact, even planning for five years is now a stretch. The world is changing, fast.)
For most of my career, my forecasts have largely involved this group of tech companies. For several years I have stood in the boardrooms at Fortune 500 brands explaining why they should worry about companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google—these gigantic beasts, these new models of companies seemingly sprung from the ether to huge scale in no time at all, without the staff or infrastructure of traditional business. And using counterintuitive models—such as scaling, and being free—ahead of turning a profit. I was either laughed at or ignored when I told luxury brands in 2012 that—yes—even high-net-worth consumers, particularly ones in emerging markets where they are statistically younger than age thirty and tech savvy, will shop for luxury items not just online but on their iPhones and social networks. Why millennials, not just backpackers, are starting to favor Airbnb over traditional hotels. And why Amazon is becoming not just a retailer but a shopping search engine. And I’ve watched as some of these boardrooms have seen not just their company but their entire economy sector unseated at an unprecedented speed.
The change brought on by Silicon Valley is swift and sweeping, and it is essential that we understand exactly what is at stake.
Thiel’s comments about tech solving “aging” and striding forth unfettered by government no doubt resonated with many in the audience at the Tech Summit, who in London, New York, or farther afield encounter creaking infrastructure, bureaucratic inefficiency, and a ponderous slowness in addressing issues at odds with a culture used to getting what it wants quickly. People don’t see their futures represented in the parade of white-haired politicians and outdated government websites. While brands are tripping over themselves to seem “transparent” and have “purpose” to win trust from consumers, politicians aren’t in any hurry to do the same. They don’t need to. Consumers can leave a brand at any second. Elections only happen every couple of years, and that’s assuming you even vote.
So, it is no wonder that Silicon Valley’s promise to fix everything is so compelling. But that doesn’t mean Silicon Valley is the right replacement for the state. While it is true that governments are flawed, at least they are composed of people who are elected, who occupy positions with the understanding that they serve the whole of society and not just shareholders.
If Silicon Valley takes on a wider civic role, we must examine what moral framework its leaders would erect. Until recently, Uber’s philosophy was that a sexist and hostile workplace was just fine, so long as the company was successful. And while the headquarters of Amazon are glamorous, and populated by educated professionals, the drudgeries of working in its fulfillment plants are well-storied. As is its unscrupulous treatment of suppliers.
Silicon Valley’s agendas are set by groups of largely affluent, educated, male individuals; advised by white, affluent, male, baby boomer futurists and white, affluent, male, baby boomer professors. (And reported on in the media—largely—by white, educated, male tech reporters.) The denizens of Silicon Valley are the new inhabitants of the ivory tower. They are shaping culture and yet they do not interact on a regular basis with people outside of their socioeconomic group—the luxurious transit buses that ferry employees between tech campuses and San Francisco are among the most potent and widely reported examples. These companies are dominated by Ivy League–educated male staffers with access to limitless abundance of food, drink, and services on a day-to-day basis. These are not people who walk among us, so it’s unclear if they can represent the wider population at large.
Silicon Valley companies have done a good job presenting themselves as friendly, egalitarian democratizers. The projected value system of this group is largely positive. They’re pro-LGBT, pro-sustainability, pro–social good. But it’s on their own terms, and self-regulated. (Evidenced by their famously hostile work environments, gender inequality, and seeming disinterest in the very real homeless problem in their hometown of San Francisco.)
All of this is significant as Big Tech’s reach extends.
It is one thing if a company monopolizes a service—don’t subscribe to it. Or a product—don’t buy it. But what happens when that company is providing everything? And all those things are interconnected and controlling the way you live, the loans you get, the insurance you can buy, and the prices you pay for them. When your health data defines whether you get access to credit. When your productivity declines and is connected directly to your salary. The veneer of control quickly vanishes, and you’re left with monopoly not just of what you buy, but how you live. It’s a consumerist police state.
Right now, Silicon Valley companies’ most outrageous activities have been regulated by public shaming and newspaper headlines. As consumer brands who need to maintain a good reputation, they cease and desist certain behaviors if there’s enough public outcry. But as Silicon Valley eats all consumerism, not to mention media—which reports on these scandals—control quickly vanishes.
The steady creep of their expanded societal role is being facilitated by a power vacuum. According to a J. Walter Thompson consumer poll, a majority of Americans feel that government and democracy are broken. Trust is gone. Among millennials, staggeringly, there is also a unilateral enthusiasm for Silicon Valley to take more of a governmental role.
Rightly or wrongly, there is also a loss of faith in government to build our future. Like traditional travel agents surpassed by internet services offering peer-to-peer reviews and cheaper prices, government is at risk of being surpassed by cooler, more efficient tech-savvy companies.
President Barack Obama and former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan J. Smith recognized government’s image problem and embarked on a campaign in Obama’s second term to connect his administration with the glamour of the tech world. But the president could also see the Valley’s limitations in fulfilling all its bold promises. At the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh in 2016, Obama poured scorn on Silicon Valley’s hubris in blowing up all existing, outdated systems. “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.”
