Archinect - News

Billionaire-backed plan to erect a model California city qualifies for the ballot

2024-06-13T19:25:00-04:00

The billionaire proponents of a brand-new city that would rise from the rolling prairie northeast of the San Francisco Bay cleared their first big hurdle Tuesday, when the Solano County Registrar of Voters certified the group had enough signatures to put its proposal before local voters in November.

The plan calls for up to 400,000 residents to be housed nearly 60 miles from San Francisco on an over 16,000-acre land parcel currently used mainly for tomato, walnut, and plant nursery farming. The group responsible for the development, California Forever, has continued quietly surveying Solano County residents for their opinions since our last update in January. But, the LA Times says: “Project opponents said a recent [independent] poll they conducted found that 70% of the people surveyed were skeptical.”

What could come next might provide a case study for the long-held theories of Ebenezer Howard, Leon Krier, and other noted New Urbanism scholars.

Autodesk founder John Walker dies aged 74

2024-03-08T14:45:00-05:00

The New York Times is reporting Autodesk founder John Walker to have died on February 2nd at the age of 74.

The technologist and Case Western Reserve University alumnus is credited with the development of AutoCAD, a software tool which revolutionized architectural design and paved the way for the industry to expand considerably in regards to output beginning in the 1990s.

Walker, along with 12 programmers, formed the company with $59,000 in 1982 and served on its board as chairman and president until he stepped away from leadership roles in 1986, penning a memoir of his experiences titled The Autodesk File three years later.

Since then, he lived mostly in Switzerland, working on programming for the company until 1994. Autodesk grew during those years to become one of the world's ten largest software companies. Autodesk, which had to shutter its San Rafael, California, location amidst the recent recession in the tech industry, now has more than twenty offices and reported a total o...

Anti-democratic vistas: Plans for a new city in Northern Californian farmlands draw ire from concerned officials

2023-09-04T12:00:00-04:00

Over a five-year period, the company became the largest landowner in Solano County after purchasing more than 55,000 acres of undeveloped land. The company has paid more than $800 million since 2018, according to court records. [...] On the eastern end of Solano County, the city of Rio Vista is now surrounded by Flannery Associates land. Mayor Ronald Kott said that, like many Solano County officials, he had not been approached by anyone from the company to discuss plans for the land.

Similar to Marc Lore’s utopian vision for a new $400 billion Shenzhen-style city from scratch called Telosa, the secretive land grab-cum-startup city lies suspiciously close to Travis Air Force Base and is being marketed as a “new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space.”

Democratic Representative Mike Thompson told reporters last week he was “very concerned about our national security” related to the plan's proximity to the base. Some residents have reported “fear” in their dealing with the company, including concerns about retaliation. The company, meanwhile, maintains its secrecy is deliberate and intended to prevent possible real estate speculation on the part of landowners, a group of whom they have sued for collusion.

Google pauses work on 'Downtown West' San Jose development

2023-04-25T11:48:00-04:00

As part of Google’s downsizing that went into effect early this year, the company has gutted its development team for the San Jose campus. The construction project, which was supposed to break ground before the end of 2023, has been put on pause, and no plan to restart construction has been communicated to contractors, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to non-disclosure agreements.

The news broke on Friday amid a sector-wide fallout caused in part by the tech recession. CNBC reported that some sources now speculate as to whether or not the 80-acre development will be completed at the same scale though both LendLease and Google have reaffirmed their commitment to it in written statements. Google has now incurred $500 million in losses for the first quarter of the year alone on office lease exit fees.

Previously on Archinect: Google wins approval for 'Downtown West' mega campus in San Jose

Kohn Pedersen Fox, Heatherwick Studio, Grimshaw Architects, SHoP Architects, Solomon Cordwell Buenz, SITELAB urban studio, and West 8 were among the design firms attached to the construction, which was to be the single largest in San Jose history. The project was approved in 2021 after years of planning and an exchange with local opposition groups that ended in the decision to commit to adding $450 million worth of affordable housing and other community initiatives.

The proliferation of data centers is turning Virginia into ‘the Commonwealth of Amazon’

2023-02-23T16:30:00-05:00

Amazon in January signed a $35 billion contract to build new data centers across Virginia, a deal so sizable a detractor disappointed at the incentives being thrown at the tech giant said, “We might as well start calling it the Commonwealth of Amazon.”

The state’s “Data Center Alley,” Loudoun County, is still cutting $1- to $3 million-per-acre deals with tech companies that rely on hyperscale data centers designed to provide massive, scalable data storage and computing resources for cloud computing and big data processing. The currently inadequate power grid is not expected to be up to snuff until 2026. The problem is spreading beyond Old Dominion to places like Portland, Oregon, suburban Chicago, and other communities where tax incentives rule over local opposition and environmental concerns.

Back in December, the Dodge Construction network’s chief economist Richard Branch said to expect the boom to last at least another two years. The real scope of the epoch could be much longer. As reported by the Commercial Observer, experts from Cushman & Wakefield said they project the market to grow from $173 to $728 billion by 2027 for hyperscale construction alone.

Autodesk announces layoffs of 250 employees

2023-02-07T15:41:00-05:00

Software company Autodesk is cutting its total global workforce by less than 2 percent, with about 250 workers affected. A spokesperson for the San Francisco-based firm said the layoffs are part of Autodesk’s plans for its 2024 fiscal year, which began this week.

The company maintains it is still hiring for a number of positions in different locations globally. The layoffs come as an increasing number of non-architect AEC professionals are using BIM software in their day-to-day workflows, despite criticism from firms of a lack of “serious development” regarding Autodesk's proprietary software.

The move puts the company squarely in line with Amazon, Meta, and other tech giants whose cutbacks call into question employment prospects of workers. CRN also reported the company’s stock to be down 7% in the last twelve months.

Don't expect Big Tech's economic crunch to slow the pace of data center construction, experts say

2022-11-29T09:00:00-05:00

High inflation, rising interest and plummeting stocks are taking a toll on Big Tech [...] Despite the amount of blood on tech firms’ payroll ledgers, though, these massive cuts are not expected to affect the blistering pace of data center construction, according to industry sources.

The expected pullback from larger hyperscale data centers is nonetheless on pace to be absorbed by concurrent increases in the proliferation of smaller and more quickly deliverable colocation centers, according to recent market data.

Dodge Data & Analytics chief economist Richard Branch says he expects that boom will continue for at least the next two years. Google and Meta continue to be big drivers as demand is simply outstripping cost concerns. Other companies are even floating the possibility of data center construction on the moon should technology and the proper legal bodies allow.

An influx of new tech millionaires further balloons Silicon Valley's housing crisis

2019-03-29T15:50:00-04:00

As the tech companies Uber, Airbnb, Lyft and Pinterest prepare to go public, thousands more instant millionaires are expected to flood the market in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. All the while, the middle class and working poor are scrambling for shelter.

Will cities themselves become Silicon Valley's Biggest Start-Up?

2018-02-26T14:18:00-05:00

In the maddening gap between how this place functions and how inventors and engineers here think it should, many have become enamored with the same idea: What if the people who build circuits and social networks could build cities, too? Wholly new places, designed from scratch and freed from broken policies.

In Emily Badger's latest piece for the Upshot, she investigates the Tech Industry's newest sector of disruption, the City. From Alphabet company's proposal for Sidewalk Labs in Toronto to a proposed smart city in Arizona, Silicon Valley is looking to build urban utopias of their own. While the idea has received strong negative feedback, particularly from urban planners and architects who believe the tech industry should stay within its lanes, Badger wonders if approaching the problems modern cities are facing through a tabula rasa mindset might be beneficial.

The New York Times picks Denver for Amazon's new headquarters

2017-09-11T15:26:00-04:00

Amazon has set off a scrum among cities that are hoping to land the company’s second headquarters — with the winner getting the prize of a $5 billion investment and 50,000 new jobs over the next two decades. (Denver's) lifestyle and affordability, coupled with the supply of tech talent from nearby universities, has already helped build a thriving start-up scene in Denver and Boulder, 40 minutes away.

The New York Times suggests Denver for Amazon new headquarters as it offers a large and growing labour pool, access to universities, high quality of life and enough space to build eight million square feet of office space. If Amazon was to follow the New York Times advice it could drastically change the face of Denver in the next years.

Is YIMBYism the proper antidote to NIMBYism? or should we throw these terms out altogether?

2017-05-11T19:06:00-04:00

Trauss's followers live by the neoliberal belief that deregulation and building more housing, even if it's only affordable to the richest of the rich, will trickle down and eventually make housing affordable for all. Her vision is Reagonomics "dressed up in a progressive sheep's costume," according to Becker. But Trauss's "fresh approach" to the dilemma of exploding housing costs has got conservative libertarians and lefty media outlets alike foaming at the mouth for more.

San Francisco, and the surrounding Bay Area, has long been the example around which issues of gentrification are discussed and cited. While it is far from being the only city to deal with an influx of wealth and the subsequent displacement of local residents, its role as the center of the tech boom has given the area one of brightest spotlights in regards to these questions. In a recent article put out by Truth-Out, the authors discuss the rise of a new (according to the authors) approach to solving housing crises—YIMBYism. YIMBYism stands for Yes-In-My-Backyard and is meant to designate a positive stance on development. It is an approach, as characterized by the authors, as being along the lines of trickle-down economics—the idea being that building more housing, even if it's only affordable to higher-income earners, will eventually make housing more affordable for all.

The article focuses on the conservatives running this movement claiming that they have become the "Alt-Right" of ...

Making Space for More Tech Firms in New York City

2014-08-28T13:47:00-04:00

As New York City’s burgeoning tech economy continues to grow, startups face the same challenges for office space they would anywhere else—but have the added challenge of Manhattan-level price tags, vying for space with law firms, banks, and other well-financed tenants. An absolute lack of space is not the issue, however. New York’s low 10 percent office vacancy rate may be second only to Washington, D.C.’s 9.6 percent, but an enormous amount of inventory is going up [...].

Related: Working out of the Box interview with Miguel McKelvey, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at WeWork.

Culture Wars in San Francisco

2014-07-09T13:03:00-04:00

San Francisco today has the second-highest median income in the United States, but, even using that peg, middle-income San Franciscans can afford less than a sixth of the homes available in town. Every city on the up-and-up must contend with a gap between rich and poor. Yet few have also, like San Francisco, managed to immiserate a relatively well-heeled middle class.

SF gentrification doesn't have to be bad

2014-01-24T13:56:00-05:00

San Francisco is practically the reductio ad absurdum of gentrification: It’s already land limited on three sides by water, and the massive rise of the tech industry over the last few decades has dramatically increased both the population of the area and its wealth. [...] But the blame shouldn’t go to the tech companies or their employees moving to San Francisco, however despicable some might be. Blame San Francisco for being pleasant, and its policymakers for being foolish

What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning

2013-12-16T17:59:00-05:00

The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists?