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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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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.”
The full article definitely takes an interesting perspective on how new office parks--excluding CBD offices--continue the trend of exclusion of uses by looking at how the suburban office park developed in the US and how new developments, like Apple's spaceship, continue that trend.
Why would corporations leave suburban settings to pay more to be downtown where the employees have longer commutes?
What's innovative about being in the CBD? It's just 1920. Actually, it's more like 1950. Suburban offices weren't all that common in 1950.
As far as Apple 2 not being innovative and looking like some CBD cube farm.. uhh, obviously idiot with an axe to grind. Sure, the innovative stuff is limited to just the weird circular shape with it's unique architecture. I guess the underground parking isn't innovative, net zero energy, 100,000 square foot wellness center, 60,000 square foot cafeteria, circular design being chosen to maximize open space and breakout rooms is really exactly like a big square building with cubicles. And that's technically true. All that stuff has been done before. More importantly, obviously the big square with cubicles is way more innovative because it's in the CBD which makes it innovative.
Anyway, they're not stuck in the suburbs. If Apple wanted to be in downtown San Francisco, it has plenty of money to be in downtown San Francisco. As always though, the idea that people or corporations should be allowed to think for themselves and locate where they want to be is just intolerable to a vocal minority of keyboard warriors banging away on their blogs. Couple that with a heavy dose of anti-corporate shill who thinks that providing a decent work environment is a bad thing because then people won't have to unionize and fight the good fight against the evil corporations who are abusing them terribly and you get that. Damn those evil corporations for not being evil enough and disrupting the proper order by not abusing their workforce enough and appeasing them too much with high pay, good benefits, and creating an good work environment. It's disrupting the proper order of things and keeping employees from doing what they're meant to do, go on strike.
Why would corporations leave suburban settings to pay more to be downtown where the employees have longer commutes?
What's innovative about being in the CBD? It's just 1920. Actually, it's more like 1950. Suburban offices weren't all that common in 1950.
As far as Apple 2 not being innovative and looking like some CBD cube farm.. uhh, obviously idiot with an axe to grind.
The author was talking not about inner form--open plans, cafes and lounges--but about how the suburban office park became single-company towns unto themselves, in every way shielding themselves and their employees from the outside world. It's not that, say, the Apple spaceship isn't architecturally innovative, but that it is a 70-year-old idea--the suburban office park--in shiny new packaging.
Here, take these passages:
Quote:
Mozingo’s concept of a separatist landscape builds off the ideas of geographer Allan Pred, who describes how our daily path through the built environment is a major influence on our culture and values. “If you live in a typical suburban place,” Mozingo explains, “you get in your car and drive to work by yourself, then stay in your office for the entire day seeing only other colleagues, and then drive back home alone. You’re basically only interested in improving highways and your office building.” Even as big tech touts its green credentials, the offices for Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk are inundated with parking, discreetly hidden below ground like their savvy mid-century forebears, encouraging employees to continue their solo commutes.
“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.
Well the thesis of the article makes the rest of the article rather silly.
"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."
Take the Apple example. First stop this "community" nonsense. Community is not a person. If you want to talk about Apple's customers - they are worldwide. The company has numerous locations throughout the world. The company happens to locate its headquarters in one place. Companies are not there to "serve" employees. Like it or not companies hire employees for the benefit of the company and its stockholders. Consumers don't go to the company headquarters - they go to Apple stores, online, or to other stores that sell Apple products. So the very first example was a poor example for the thesis
Look at the other comments: "Even as big tech touts its green credentials, the offices for Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk are inundated with parking, discreetly hidden below ground like their savvy mid-century forebears, encouraging employees to continue their solo commutes." Really? - so if the parking is exposed then they get accused of ruining the "urban fabric". If they hide the parking they are deemed isolationist. Why should a company want non-employees perusing through company parking lots to begin with? Certainly those individuals are not welcome inside nor historically have random people from the street been welcome to the internal offices of non-retail company sites.
The CBD idea is not new and not really feasible. You know these authors might want to look at the evolution of integrated circuit microprocessors as the ultimate "planned city". Microprocessors have variously run into different bottlenecks. Initially it was processor speed. Then memory speed became a bottleneck. I/O speed can also be a bottleneck. The designers have to find ever more efficient ways of getting the resources to the core and data/control out of the core. You'll find most microprocessors these days are "multi-core" rather than single core. In any event "upgrading" means throwing away the prior chip and installing a new one. Urbanists aren't willing to tear everything down and start anew and many of them even worship at the alter of "preserving neighborhoods" or "preserving character". They aren't willing to put in roads (e.g., wider bus in computer terms) to address congestion. They just want more people (congestion) in the same spot. For what end? The urbanist is his own bottleneck.
The author must have written the thesis after writing the rest of the story. "Community" is code for "we want to take what is yours for the benefit of someone else". Try identifying the person that is "better off" - certainly it would not be the business owners nor the employees. Malloric made many good points above.
Note what one of the commenters stated in the article:
I love these suburban office parks. Cheap office space, easy to drive to, no parking fees, no urban “crush of humanity.” Any downsides are more than outweighed by the upsides.
Regarding Apple and other south SF bay companies, having spent a fair amount of time in what is now Silicon Valley in the 1960s, I'll throw out a couple of ideas...
- The various tech firms like HP that were pioneers in the area had a very synergistic relationship with Stanford University and SRI.
- Similarly, there was a lot of interchange with NASA and the US Navy at Moffett Field; people tend to forget the tight relationship between the computing and defense/aerospace industries that prevailed at the time.
- Big data processing facilities needed very large floor plates to handle the below-floor cooling and air handling systems. The physical requirements of the buildings made locating in more urban or CBD settings impractical.
It's my understanding that similar relationship factors played an important role in firms locating along suburban Boston's Rte. 128 corridor.
So I think the location choices for other firms had a lot to do with the physical and B2B requirements of the companies rather than any particular longing for suburban locations.
but about how the suburban office park became single-company towns unto themselves, in every way shielding themselves and their employees from the outside world.
This is pretty much what every large employment center wants and tries to create, whether it's in the middle of a CBD or out in the suburbs. Why? Because the more you can keep your employees near each other and at their place of work, the more productive things they're going to do.
If I go out for lunch, I'm probably not seeing many of my coworkers, not talking about work-related things, and it's taking additional time for me to go and come back. If I stay in for lunch, I'm probably sitting with coworkers, the conversation is likely to in part revolve around our work or related topics, and so lunch becomes still productive to the company in a high-tech workplace. (Obviously, talking about work does not accomplish anything if you work at a manufacturing firm and attach the same car door to the same frame day after day).
The same is basically true of all the other amenities. Software engineers are expensive. Building and maintaining a company gym so they keep interacting with each other off the clock does not cost many software engineers and gets you more productivity improvements AND makes the employees happy. And so on.
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- Big data processing facilities needed very large floor plates to handle the below-floor cooling and air handling systems. The physical requirements of the buildings made locating in more urban or CBD settings impractical.
Also, being located in a CBD is a security/disaster protection nightmare. Things happen in cities, be they riots/protests, terrorism, natural disasters (as many CBDs are quite vulnerable to flooding and such), some big event shutting down half the city, etc.
Things like that don't happen in suburbs with reasonable planning put into the location, and it's far easier to say....maintain tanks of diesel and sufficient generators to run the place for a month and keep perfect uptime regardless of what happens with local infrastructure.
Why would corporations leave suburban settings to pay more to be downtown where the employees have longer commutes?
What's innovative about being in the CBD? It's just 1920. Actually, it's more like 1950. Suburban offices weren't all that common in 1950.
As far as Apple 2 not being innovative and looking like some CBD cube farm.. uhh, obviously idiot with an axe to grind. Sure, the innovative stuff is limited to just the weird circular shape with it's unique architecture. I guess the underground parking isn't innovative, net zero energy, 100,000 square foot wellness center, 60,000 square foot cafeteria, circular design being chosen to maximize open space and breakout rooms is really exactly like a big square building with cubicles. And that's technically true. All that stuff has been done before. More importantly, obviously the big square with cubicles is way more innovative because it's in the CBD which makes it innovative.
Anyway, they're not stuck in the suburbs. If Apple wanted to be in downtown San Francisco, it has plenty of money to be in downtown San Francisco. As always though, the idea that people or corporations should be allowed to think for themselves and locate where they want to be is just intolerable to a vocal minority of keyboard warriors banging away on their blogs. Couple that with a heavy dose of anti-corporate shill who thinks that providing a decent work environment is a bad thing because then people won't have to unionize and fight the good fight against the evil corporations who are abusing them terribly and you get that. Damn those evil corporations for not being evil enough and disrupting the proper order by not abusing their workforce enough and appeasing them too much with high pay, good benefits, and creating an good work environment. It's disrupting the proper order of things and keeping employees from doing what they're meant to do, go on strike.
A lot of corporations have, in fact, left suburban settings because of lot of younger workers want to live close to downtown. So by doing that, their employees actually have shorter commutes. Suburban office parks simply followed the workers who moved to the suburbs. Now companies that are moving to downtowns are simply doing the same thing.
And even if a lot of workers live in the suburbs, a lot of companies still choose to be in CBDs with commuter rail access because it allows them to attract workers from an entire metropolitan area whereas in a suburban setting, the company would only be able to attract nearby workers.
They aren't willing to put in roads (e.g., wider bus in computer terms) to address congestion.
Have you ever heard of induced demand? Basically, if more roads are built, they quickly fill up and become congested. Building new roads doesn't relieve congestion in the long run.
The author was talking not about inner form--open plans, cafes and lounges--but about how the suburban office park became single-company towns unto themselves, in every way shielding themselves and their employees from the outside world. It's not that, say, the Apple spaceship isn't architecturally innovative, but that it is a 70-year-old idea--the suburban office park--in shiny new packaging.
As opposed to the oh, so innovative concept of the high-rise office tower cube farm, right.
Here, take these passages:
Quote:
Mozingo’s concept of a separatist landscape builds off the ideas of geographer Allan Pred, who describes how our daily path through the built environment is a major influence on our culture and values. “If you live in a typical suburban place,” Mozingo explains, “you get in your car and drive to work by yourself, then stay in your office for the entire day seeing only other colleagues, and then drive back home alone. You’re basically only interested in improving highways and your office building.” Even as big tech touts its green credentials, the offices for Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk are inundated with parking, discreetly hidden below ground like their savvy mid-century forebears, encouraging employees to continue their solo commutes.
“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.
Which is absolutely hilarious to anyone that's spent any time in a suburb like Menlo Park, Mountain View, or Cupertino. It's actually excellent satire except for the fact that I'm pretty sure Mozingo isn't actually trying to be satirical. It really is a shame what the isolated culture has done to Mountain View. The little downtown is closed up and abandoned. The only place one can pop in for coffee is a gas station and lunch options are limited to fast food. The parks haven't been maintained for years, what few of them that are left that haven't been turned into more houses and offices. The libraries are closed. Shoreline closed down years ago and is actually a big homeless camp. They just pretend to have shows as it's part of propaganda to make the horrible isolated suburban lifestyle seem attractive.
It's my understanding that similar relationship factors played an important role in firms locating along suburban Boston's Rte. 128 corridor.
Not really. A bit with Hanscom Field but MIT is in Cambridge across the bridge from Back Bay Boston. 128, and later the 495 belt, were driven by real estate prices. There's now a huge amount of new construction for biotech around Kendall Square by MIT. Boston's problem is the public transportation infrastructure is hub & spoke. Commuter rail goes to South Station and North Station. Cambridge access is iffy since the Red Line subway doesn't go through North Station.
GE is moving their corporate HQ from Fairfield County to South Boston by the convention center and Gillette. I figure it's inevitable that the trend will continue to push things to be walkable to South Station and a quick Red Line ride to Harvard/MIT and Silver Line ride to the airport.
The salvation for 128 and 495 is going to be autonomous cars. Once you can run computerized cars in dedicated lanes bumper-to-bumper at 60 mph during rush hour, you will actually be able to commute on those roads. I figure autonomous shared vans will also be big. Once cars can drive themselves, you can network everything together and put 10 commuters in a very comfortable van instead of 1-per-car.
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