When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of “innovation.” Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the “futuristic” building and its many “groundbreaking” features. But few are aware that Apple’s monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.
“It’s about making the corporation your entire life.”
In the 1940s and ’50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the ‘burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.
Though these sprawling developments were initially hailed as innovative, America’s experiment with suburban, car-centric lifestyles eventually proved problematic, both for its exclusiveness and environmental drawbacks: Such communities intentionally prevented certain ethnic groups and lower-income people from moving there, while enforcing zoning rules that maximized driving. Today’s tech campuses, which the New York Times describes as “the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few,” are no better, having done nothing to disrupt the isolated, anti-urban landscape favored by mid-century corporations.
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“This is an extraordinarily different context than the way people lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” Mozingo says. Before the development of mid-century suburbia with its isolated residential, retail, civic, and office zones, cities were built with a highly varied, walkable fabric where encountering strangers was the norm. Even in smaller towns, people walked or took transit to work, could grab coffee or lunch at a neighboring restaurant, or pop into a public library, plaza, or park. “You’d have a vastly more complex set of people, places, and experiences to deal with and think about,” Mozingo says.
In her influential 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs celebrated this complicated urban landscape, which encourages what she called the “ballet of the good city sidewalk.” At a time when cities were being deserted by wealthy companies and residents for more homogenous suburban towns, Jacobs pointed to evidence that communities need walkable, diverse streetscapes that foster unplanned interactions with others in order to thrive.
While many modern office developments specifically include lounges or multipurpose zones where employees might randomly interact with one another, these spaces are entirely limited to office staff—with the aim that conversations would further relationships or spark ideas beneficial to the business. “I look at Apple’s Norman Foster building, and it’s 1952 all over again,” Mozingo says. “There’s nothing innovative about it. It’s a classic corporate estate from the 1950s, with a big block of parking. Meanwhile, Google is building another version of the office park with a swoopy roof and cool details—but it does nothing innovative.”
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