Archinect - News

When Facebook and Instagram went dark, architecture Twitter was there for the laughs

2021-10-05T11:46:00-04:00

In my opinion, remembering what it was like before social media and high-speed internet access is a gift. The early days of social media barely resemble the landscape of how impressionable and profit-driven it is today. Data privacy wasn't considered "a thing," and promoting a product or service back then was influential thanks to television, radio, and print media. However, when social media titans Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down, many came flooding back to Twitter to stay connected. Thanks to this 6-hour social media outage, 'architecture Twitter' was there to express what many of us were thinking.

Social media is defined as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)." Today, this term has become synonymous with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Twitter to name a few...

Facebook to invest $150 million to build 2,000 affordable homes in Bay Area

2020-12-10T13:28:00-05:00

Facebook plans to invest $150 million to build 2,000 homes for low-income residents in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Silicon Valley-based social media giant said Wednesday the money would support the development of affordable homes for families making less than 30 percent of the region’s median income.

According to The Real Deal, "the funds will be available to local governments and nonprofit groups in the form of low-interest loans. Projects in San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties are eligible. " The investment is due for full distribution by 2026, reports The Real Deal.

Here’s what Facebook’s huge new office will look like at Midtown’s former Farley Post Office

2020-08-04T12:34:00-04:00

Facebook has signed a lease for 730,000 square feet at the former James A. Farley Post Office, a Midtown landmark currently being converted into a mixed-use building, Vornado Realty Trust announced Monday. In less than a year, Facebook has acquired more than 2.2 million square feet of office space on Manhattan's West Side.

Facebook to build giant data center in Illinois

2020-07-10T14:14:00-04:00

Facebook is due to commence construction on its 12th data center in the United States with a new $800 million, 907,000-square-foot facility located in DeKalb, Illinois. The data center will be powered by 100% renewable energy and will use 80% less water than the average data center, the company writes in a statement. Upon completion, the project will obtain LEED Gold certification.

Moreover, the new facility will provide an estimated 100 operational jobs and employ an estimated 1,200 construction workers who will be working onsite for "several years," according to the company. Mortenson Construction was selected as the general contractor for the job. An architect for the project has not been listed.

Facebook has also partnered with the City of DeKalb, Kishwaukee Water Reclamation District, and Krusinski Construction Company to help design, build, and support the infrastructure for the 500-acre site. The work includes nearly three miles of water lines, one and a half miles of sewer...

Facebook is using Minecraft to train a multi-tasking AI assistant

2019-09-10T15:30:00-04:00

Arthur Szlam and colleagues at Facebook Research have begun work on an AI assistant that can learn from its interactions with humans and then perform a wide range of tasks on request. The more it learns the more it can do. The team has chosen Minecraft, the best-selling 3D sandbox video game, as its medium to develop this new AI.

"Instead of superhuman performance on a single difficult task, we are interested in competency across a large number of simpler tasks, specified by humans," the team said according the the MIT Technology Review. The video game environment allows the AI to interact with countless human users, creating a feedback loop of heightened performance and learning.

The team's hope is to eventually create a self-improving AI that does not need to be "trained" by a human.

Images surface of Facebook's potential new tower in Manhattan designed by Rafael Viñoly

2019-06-05T17:44:00-04:00

One of the largest potential office buildings in New York City has long been in the works on the site of the Hotel Pennsylvania, at 401 Seventh Avenue, with renderings for a soaring supertall first released last decade [...] the latest on Vornado’s newest vision for the site, which would place Facebook within a massive 2.8-million-square-foot tower designed by Rafael Vinoly, dubbed “Penn15” in the brochure.

Renderings of the 1,400-foot structure paint a new picture for Facebook's new office building plan. It's been stated that "Facebook has already publicly committed to One Madison Avenue in NoMad, so this ideation may already be moribund." Despite the recent commitment placed by Facebook, Vornado Realty Trust visualizes a new possible plan. The company toys with the idea of a new configuration for the 401 Seventh Avenue site in Midtown Manhattan. The creation of another mega skyscraper lets Vornado join the likes of Related's Hudson Yards and Brookfield's Manhattan West in new redevelopment ventures.

Rendering of Facebook's "possible" supertall taken from brochure. Image © Vornado

The new "Facebook" tower has been dubbed "Penn15". Users on Twitter have already shared their reactions to the recent announcement and name choice linking it to an all too noticeable innuendo. Renderings show emphasis on open floor plans and a large number of outdoor spaces covered in trees. "Variable stacke...

Facebook to double its London presence with new King's Cross buildings by AHMM and Bennetts

2018-07-25T13:57:00-04:00

Facebook is doubling its presence in London by acquiring office space across two buildings in King's Cross. The 600,000 square feet (56,000 square meters) of office space will be enough for more than 6,000 workstations. [...] The expansion follows the 2017 opening of its site at Rathbone Place, which added 800 jobs and opened its first in-house incubator program for startup businesses. It also has a location on Brock Street.

Considerably ramping up its workplace capacity by 611,000 sq ft in soon-to-be post-Brexit London, Facebook will be moving into new buildings at King's Cross: 11 and 21 Canal Reach, designed by Bennetts Associates, the ten and twelve-story-buildings already have detailed planning permission, as well as the nine-story-structure P2 by 2015 Stirling-Prize winning Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) with a pending reserved matters planning application.

11 and 21 Canal Reach by Bennetts Associates. Image: King's Cross.

"The deal comes just weeks after Samsung Electronics announced an agreement to open ‘Samsung KX LDN’, a 20,000 sq ft showcase space at Coal Drops Yard, the new Heatherwick Studio-designed shopping and lifestyle district in King’s Cross, in October," reads a King's Cross statement.

The new offices are expected to open in 2021.

Facebook plans to build their own 59-acre housing development in Silicon Valley

2018-04-06T18:22:00-04:00

Facebook is testing the proposition: Do people love tech companies so much they will live inside of them? When the project was announced last summer, critics dubbed it Facebookville or, in tribute to company co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Zucktown. [...] If Facebook’s image is permanently sullied by the furor over Cambridge Analytica, the data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Zucktown will falter before it is finished.

Like Google's Sidewalk Labs for Toronto and Bill Gates' proposed smart city in Arizona, Facebook is working to make their own housing development, Willow Village, a living reality in Silicon Valley. Nicknamed “Zucktown” and “Facebookville” by critics, the project will occupy a 59-acre site in between the gentrified Menlo Park neighborhood and East Palo Alto. The New York Times reports that Willow Village will offer 1,500 apartments, and Facebook made an agreement with Menlo Park to offer 225 of the units at below-market rates.

“It is a project with many precedents in American history, quite a few of them cautionary tales about what happens when a powerful corporation takes control of civic life,” The New York Times article states.

Gehry reportedly tapped for new Facebook London HQ in King’s Cross

2018-02-12T13:44:00-05:00

Facebook is close to signing a deal for a new British headquarters at the King’s Cross redevelopment in London. The social media giant is understood to be finalising outline terms with King’s Cross Central, which is majority-owned by the AustralianSuper pension fund. Facebook is expected to take four buildings covering more than 700,000 sq ft, tripling the size of its footprint in the capital.

King's Cross is further strengthening its position as London's emerging tech hub, following previous proposed developments like Google's mega "landscraper" HQ, designed jointly by Heatherwick Studio and BIG.

According to The Times and Architect's Journal, Gehry Partners is considered as architect for the new Facebook London base. Gehry and Zuckerberg go way back and have already collaborated on Facebook's Silicon Valley, New York, Dublin, and other London offices.

Architecture critic Rowan Moore on the extravagant “palace” headquarters of tech giants

2017-07-25T20:46:00-04:00

It’s also striking that for all its fame Silicon Valley makes little impression on the visual consciousness of the world – there’s not a strong sense of what it actually looks like. Until now it has lacked landmarks. But that much power and that much money will not always be happy to be unobtrusive. We are only just beginning to see the ways in which it can change the landscape of cities.

Architecture critic Rowan Moore analyzes how tech giants Apple, Google, and Facebook are appointing world-famous architecture firms to design their increasingly extravagant office campuses, as symbols of their global power.

“For the tech giants are now in the same position as great powers in the past – the bankers of the Italian Renaissance, the skyscraper-builders of the 20th century, the Emperor Augustus, Victorian railway companies – whereby, whether they want to or not, their size and wealth find expression in spectacular architecture [...],” Moore writes. “Having as much sense of their own importance as those previous powers, tech companies probably don’t mind commissioning structures that define their time.”

Allison Arieff describes Silicon Valley's outdated and dysfunctional planning

2017-07-10T14:08:00-04:00

The built environment of the Valley does not reflect the innovation that’s driving the region’s stratospheric growth; it looks instead like the 1950s. Looking at aerial views of midcentury campuses like the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs next to contemporary ones like Apple, it’s nearly impossible to tell the midcentury structures from the 21st-century ones.

While Silicon Valley is a place of much interest to many, its architectural image and overall planning is hard to grasp or call successful.

Allison Arieff of NY Times argues that the isolated corporate headquarters of tech giants have no consideration for the larger context of their surroundings, and heavily contribute to the Bay area's ever-worsening traffic which in combination with the outdated zoning laws, makes the whole region an extremely hard place to live in.

"In 2011, when asked by a City Council member what benefit the new Apple headquarters would have for Cupertino, Steve Jobs responded that it’d get to keep the company there. And that’s about the extent of what it got. A project like the new Norman Foster-designed Apple Park shows a blatant disregard not only for the citizens of Cupertino but also for the functionality of the region."

Apple Headquarters in Cupertino

"Because of the Bay Area’s chronic underinvestment in housing and transit, home prices escalate and cong...

Facebook and OMA New York to collaborate on mixed-use masterplan in Menlo Park

2017-07-07T13:09:00-04:00

Facebook announced today that it has partnered with OMA to design the masterplan for Willow Campus, a mixed-use neighborhood adjacent to their existing headquarters in Menlo Park.

"The first official step will be the filing of our plan with Menlo Park in July 2017. We will begin more formal conversations with local government officials and community organizations over the course of the review process, which we expect to last approximately two years."—writes John Tenales, VP Global Facilities and Real Estate. "We envision construction will follow in phases, with the first to include the grocery, retail, housing and office completed in early 2021, and subsequent phases will take two years each to complete."

Facebook also plans on building 1,500 units of housing on the campus, 15% of which will be offered at below market rates to mitigate traffic impacts from growth. "These efforts complement our ongoing work to address the issue, including the Catalyst Housing Fund for affordable ho...

Mark Zuckerberg unveils a home operating AI app called "Jarvis"

2016-12-20T14:05:00-05:00

At last, somebody understands Mark Zuckerberg, and it's an artificial intelligence app that speaks with the wisdom and patience of Morgan Freeman. Partially an internet of things melded with a changeable, celebrity-cameo Siri (Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief aural appearance), Zuckerberg's home-running app Jarvis is demonstrated by the inventor himself in the video below.

Facebook in the news:

Facebook enters the housing market – and it's probably not a good thing

2016-07-26T17:38:00-04:00

Facebook could be your next landlord. In an effort to drum up support for the controversial expansion of its headquarters, the social media giant is trying to give back to the community by building at least 1,500 housing units that can be rented by the general public—not just Facebook employees [...] Facebook has pledged that 15 percent of the new units it creates will go to low- or middle-income families.

...Which is great until you realize that 85 percent of the building will probably be ridiculously expensive and probably populated by local tech bros.

For more on Silicon Valley urbanism, check out these links:

Without Uber or Lyft, Austin turns to Facebook for rides

2016-06-22T13:30:00-04:00

On May 9, 10,000 Uber drivers effectively lost their jobs. So they did what anyone in 2016 does, they turned to Facebook to mobilize—and soon enough the passengers followed. [...] The new system works like this: A prospective rider posts their pickup location within the group and within minutes several drivers usually comment with their contact information and screenshot of their Uber and/or Lyft profile. From there, the passenger and chosen driver negotiate a trip price privately.

Related on Archinect:

Silicon Valley campuses at risk as sea levels rise

2016-05-03T14:29:00-04:00

Sea level forecasts by a coalition of scientists show that the Silicon Valley bases for Facebook, Google and Cisco are at risk of being cut off or even flooded, even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe sea level increases. Without significant adaptation, Facebook’s new campus appears most at risk.

San Francisco to mandate solar panels for new constructionsWhile the Frank Gehry-designed campus was elevated to prevent flooding, even a 1.6 ft rise – on the low end of predictions – will "inundate" the campus. Google is a little better off but will also be swamped if the Antarctic ice sheet starts breaking up, as evidence suggests may happen imminently.

For more news on rising tides in the Bay Area:

This month, Archinect's news and editorial are organized around a special theme – Help – with focused coverage on social and humanitarian issues affecting the built environment with an eye towards ways architects can mobilize and enact positive change.

Have related projects of your own? Submit to our open call before Sunday, May ...

Is Apple's campus design about making the corporation your entire life?

2016-04-14T13:04:00-04:00

When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, and Apple will pat itself on the back for yet another example of "innovation." ...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.

This fascinating article delves into the soul-sucking thinking behind isolated corporate behemoth design, which essentially captures the employee for the entire day and encourages a detached, "Who cares; I've got mine!" thinking towards maintaining urban infrastructure. Consider this:

Connecticut General’s new corporate estate included snack bars, ping-pong tables, shuffleboards, bowling alleys, tennis courts, horseshoe pits, a barbershop, beauty parlor, game room, media library, meditation room, and gas station, as well as offsite services like dry-cleaning, shoe repair, flowers, and grocery delivery—more than half a century before Google and Facebook added such benefits. "All these perks had a certain element of welfare capitalism," Mozingo says, "this idea that the all-inclusive physical environment is going to foster certain kinds of behavior, which are profitable for the company."

This thinking extended into the employee's need for a car:

Even the shift to personal vehicles rathe...

Mark Zuckerberg's resolution for 2016: build an at-home AI "like Jarvis in Iron Man"

2016-01-05T15:32:00-05:00

"I'm very interested in using voice and face recognition to set lights and temperature as well depending on who is in what rooms, etc," he writes. [...] The really interesting part of Zuckerberg's AI plan is when it moves past standard smart home controls and into his work. Describing the "simple AI" that he intends to build, Zuckerberg writes, "On the work side, it'll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively."

You can read Mark Zuckerberg's entire Facebook post on his AI home-plan here. Referring to already commercially available "smart home" technologies (such as temperature, entertainment, or security controls), Zuckerberg plans to build on existing products to make them more responsive with less input – to be able to recognize his presence vs. his wife's, for example, without either of them "announcing" themselves to the tech.

More heavy-hitting forays into the "smart home":

Roll call of Chicago Architecture Biennial participants on Twitter, Facebook, and by world region

2015-09-30T18:39:00-04:00

Whether you're attending this weekend's Chicago Architecture Biennial in person or virtually, Jessica A.S. Letaw's comprehensive alphabetical lists of biennial participants on Twitter, Facebook, and by World Region makes it easy to quickly update yourself on who's doing what, where. Here are the links to get started:

• Chicago Architecture Biennial: Roll Call - Twitter

• Chicago Architecture Biennial: Roll Call - Facebook

• Chicago Architecture Biennial: Participants By World Region

"Clarity and Contradiction": Part II of our conversation with Kevin Roche, and a discussion about Patrik Schumacher's latest Facebook rant on Archinect Sessions #25

2015-04-16T18:30:00-04:00

Paul's back from Peru, just in time for our 25th episode! And thanks to Patrik Schumacher, it's mostly about criticism. We respond to a polemic/rant left by Schumacher on his Facebook page, "In Defense of Stars and Icons", and consider not simply his argument, but its presentation – how publishing these ideas on a personal Facebook page ultimately says more about celebrity and criticism than Schumacher's exorbitant word count can. In the end, we applaud Schumacher – not for his argument necessarily, but for his performative act of posting such. Now, more than ever in the saturated critical sphere of new media, the medium is the message.

We also finish up the interview Amelia did with Pritzker Prize winner Kevin Roche, and hear his thoughts on sprawl and the undeniable human instinct to gather. Roche is a quiet heavyweight in architecture, amassing an incredible extent of work across multiple eras of architectural history, all without paying any heed to "starchitecture", in any form....

Patrik Schumacher takes to Facebook "In Defense of Stars and Icons"

2015-04-10T14:59:00-04:00

Earlier today, Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects posted a nearly 1,400 word polemic on Facebook denouncing contemporary architecture criticism and defending the “star-system” that has been instrumental in his firm’s success in the last few decades. Instead of “seeing conspicuity and success merely as a red cloth and occasion to knock down icons (and to teach the virtues of the ordinary, obscure and underappreciated),” Schumacher suggests that the role of the architecture critic should be to explicate and defend the work and status of successful architects to an ignorant public.

Schumacher sets out some “heuristic principles” that he hopes could guide his proposed role for the architecture critic. He states that so-called “iconic architecture” is the invention of critics rather than “the architects’ discourse,” which “serves the purpose of filling the explanatory gap that inevitably opens up because the methodology and motivation behind the unusual appearance of a radically ...

"American Disruption, at Home and Abroad": Gehry's Facebook HQ opens and Airbnb comes to Cuba on Archinect Sessions Episode #24

2015-04-09T17:39:00-04:00

Whatever becomes of Facebook’s corporate future – and therefore the consequential Internet – will play out in the world of Frank Gehry. The architect’s new HQ for Facebook in Menlo Park, MPK20, opened earlier this week with plentiful Instagrammed fanfare, and Facebook recently submitted plans to build two more Gehry buildings in the area. As we discuss on this week’s podcast, MPK20 is refreshingly old-school FOG, designed to embrace Facebook's “work in progress” feel that Gehry’s rougher materiality embraces. It’s Facebook’s and FOG’s world; we’re just living in it.

This episode, we also discuss the arrival of Airbnb in Cuba – whether this style of tourism could encourage architectural preservation, and what the company’s disruptive cachet means when there’s no status quo to disrupt. We’re also featuring part 1 of an interview I did with Kevin Roche, the Pritzker Prize winning architect who got his start over sixty years ago, working with Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen. The 92-y...

Facebook hires Gehry again for next two buildings in Menlo Park

2015-04-07T20:10:00-04:00

The same week Facebook employees moved into a new Frank Gehry-designed building with a massive green roof, the social media giant submitted plans to Menlo Park for the construction of two office buildings on 58 acres it purchased last year. [...] Also designed by Gehry, the two office buildings would total 985,719 square feet and have a similar look, feel and height to the new Facebook building across from its main headquarters.

Previously: Gehry's new Facebook campus opens for business and much more

Gehry's new Facebook campus opens for business

2015-03-31T12:59:00-04:00

But the Facebook building is something different. [...] For one, it’s more subdued. ... Gehry held back for Facebook. “From the start, Mark wanted a space that was unassuming, matter-of-fact, and cost effective,” Gehry says in statement, referring to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “He did not want it overly designed.” [...] The open floor plan has become a cliche. But Facebook helped set the cliche—and it takes the idea so much further than most.

Facebook's "Zee Town" and the rocky history of corporate urbanism

2015-03-16T12:52:00-04:00

In founding a town for some 10,000 of his employees to call their own, the Facebook mogul is following generations of entrepreneurs, from the Dutch East India Company to Walt Disney. [...] Zuckerberg’s version is to take the form of a 200-acre private municipality adjacent to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, masterplanned by long-time collaborator Frank Gehry and ever-so-humbly dubbed “Zee Town”.

Previous news from Gehry's work with Zuckerberg:

Facebook, Gehry Build Idea Factory for RipStik Geeks

Frank Gehry about his Battersea Power Station project, Norman Foster, Mark Zuckerberg

Second Facebook Building In Luleå, Sweden, To Test New Rapid Deployment Data Center Concept

2014-03-11T14:21:00-04:00

The newly announced second building at Facebook’s data center in Luleå, Sweden, will be the first of the social network’s data centers to be built using its new rapid deployment data center concept, which leans on modular and lean construction principles, much like those demonstrated by Swedish furniture giant Ikea.

Facebook hires architect Frank Gehry for Dublin, London offices

2013-11-07T15:19:00-05:00

Facebook is taking its friendship with Frank Gehry across the Atlantic, reportedly signing the Los Angeles architect to work on new office space in Dublin, Ireland, where the company already has a major presence. He will also design new office space for Facebook in London.

Previously: Facebook's positive experience with Gehry in California leads to commission to design new NYC office

Facebook is getting into the housing business?

2013-10-02T14:06:00-04:00

The $120 million, 630,000-square-foot complex, called Anton Menlo, is a partnership between Facebook and Northern California residential real estate developer St. Anton Partners. Details of the financial arrangement, including Facebook's investment, were not disclosed. Designed by Southern California KTGY Group, it will have a mix of studios and one, two and three-bedroom apartments. As part of Facebook's agreement with the city, 15 below-market-rate units are set aside for low-income tenants.

Facebook's positive experience with Gehry in California leads to commission to design new NYC office

2013-06-04T11:52:00-04:00

The company will be moving all of its teams from its current office near Grand Central to two floors at the new office, the interior of which architect Frank Gehry has agreed to design. Gehry is already leading the expansion of Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. A source familiar with Facebook's plans said the company is "extraordinarily pleased with [Gehry's] ability to delivery an incredible quality of design at a remarkably efficient price"...

Gawker thinks Gehry's Facebook HQ design looks like the ground

2013-03-29T16:24:00-04:00

"They felt some of those things were too flashy and not in keeping with the kind of the culture of Facebook, so they asked us to make it more anonymous. Frank (Gehry) was quite willing to tone down some of the expression of architecture in the building."