Excerpts from an article on tech company headquarters, By Paul Goldberger, Vanity Fair

In 2011, after decades in which Silicon Valley had seemed to care no more about its surroundings than about its clothes, Steve Jobs announced he had hired Sir Norman Foster to design a vast new Apple headquarters. Facebook soon commissioned an equally massive building from Frank Gehry. Google followed suit, along with Amazon, up north. As the tech industry finally turns its attention to architecture, Paul Goldberger explores what companies’ choices reveal about their cultures, their workforces, and the shifting relationship between city and suburbs.

Until now, that is. In June of 2011, four months before his death, Steve Jobs appeared before the City Council of Cupertino, where Apple’s headquarters are located. It was the last public appearance Jobs would make, and if it did not have quite the orchestrated panache of his carefully staged product unveilings in San Francisco, it was fixed even more on the future than the latest iPhone. Jobs was presenting the designs for a new headquarters building that Apple proposed to build, and that the City Council would have to approve. It was a structure unlike any other that his company, or any other in the world, had ever built: a glass building in the shape of a huge ring, 1,521 feet in diameter (or nearly five football fields), and its circumference would curve for nearly a mile. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster, the British-born architect known for the elegance of his work and for the uncompromising nature of his sleek, modern aesthetic—close to Jobs’s own. In a community that you could almost say has prided itself on its indifference to architecture, Apple, which had already changed the nature of consumer products, seemed now to want to try to do nothing less than change Silicon Valley’s view of what buildings should be.

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Inward-Bound

In Silicon Valley, almost every town is a company town. As Cupertino belongs to Apple and Mountain View is dominated overwhelmingly by Google, Menlo Park is where Facebook is located, and Palo Alto has the old, troubled, but still-enormous Hewlett-Packard. Yet you don’t always feel this. Tech companies tend to look inward; they seem to like campuses more than cities or even towns. Gehry’s Facebook building will be across the street from the company’s existing complex, which will be retained. Apple occupies more than 30 low-rise buildings in Cupertino, with the corporate headquarters in a cluster of modern glass buildings that bears the invented address of 1 Infinite Loop. The address tells you as much as you need to know about the company’s view of its campus as a self-contained environment, disconnected from the city around it, a goal that the new, Foster-designed building will achieve more fully, surely, than any building since the Pentagon, which it exceeds in circumference. The current Apple offices, which were originally put up by a real-estate developer in the early 1970s for the company Four Phase Systems, are notable less for anything about their architecture than for their exceptionally elegant signs in a small Myriad font, the identical typeface to that used on most of the company’s products. Oracle, the huge software company, built itself a kind of high-rise campus, a cluster of rounded, reflective glass towers beside the 101 Freeway a few miles north in Redwood Shores—more conspicuous than any of the old Google buildings, to be sure, but nearly as generic, since you could imagine these buildings sitting beside a freeway in Dallas or Houston as easily as on the San Francisco peninsula. They’re no more specific to Silicon Valley than the Alpine Inn

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Tech Bubbles

The growing preference of younger workers to live in cities represents a vast shift in the culture of the tech industry, and its effect is only beginning to be understood. It has certainly not escaped Amazon, which recently announced plans to construct new headquarters in downtown Seattle, also designed by NBBJ, the firm working with Google. The design consists of a trio of glass towers surrounding three enormous glass spheres. The spheres, which are of different sizes and seem to meld together, look like Buckminster Fuller domes that someone has blown out of a soap-bubble pipe. The towers, sadly, are banal, and look more like they were made to house lawyers and investment bankers than tech workers, and it is equally discouraging that the glass spheres, however much visual pop they will bring to the cityscape, will house a conference-and-dining center for the company, not public space (aside from a small dog park). The complex looks as if it will have none of the casual, somewhat funky street life that for a long time was a defining element of Seattle’s urbanism. But whatever its architectural shortcomings, the new headquarters clearly represent Amazon’s intention to cast its lot firmly with the city—where it has been located since its founding, in 1994—in notable contrast to Seattle’s other huge tech employer, Microsoft, which has been headquartered entirely in suburban Redmond for the past 27 years.

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San Jose Gets Jobs’d

Given the amount of love that younger Silicon Valleyites seem now to feel for things urban, it’s curious how indifferent the Silicon Valley culture seems to be about a city that is just beside it, San Jose. Admittedly, San Jose is no San Francisco. It’s a sprawling city of no particular character, and like so many American cities it suffers from a sad lack of energy in its downtown. An austere new City Hall, by Richard Meier, intended to ignite the downtown, merely added a touch of elegant desolation to an otherwise seedy desolation. While Adobe Systems and a handful of smaller companies are in San Jose, most of Silicon Valley ignores the city, and it continues to struggle, despite the presence of several of the most valuable companies in the world in its neighboring suburbs. When you think of the effect Twitter has had on a single neighborhood in San Francisco, it’s hard not to imagine what would have happened if Apple, say, had decided to ask Norman Foster to design a new tower in downtown San Jose instead of its spaceship in Cupertino. Where Apple went, others would have followed.

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Undoubtedly, both buildings will bring a degree of architectural excitement to Silicon Valley that it has never seen before. But the real question is whether, for all their ambition, they will do much to change the underlying suburban culture. They are both big, private, sealed-off corporate villas that most people will reach by car. At a time when the city, not the suburb, seems to hold the allure for younger workers in the technology industry, how much will Foster’s refined, iPhone-like architecture or Gehry’s lively, garden-topped workspace matter? Twitter’s renovated office space in an old San Francisco neighborhood may, in the end, be the real harbinger of the future.