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. — New York Times
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of their surroundings, and heavily contribute to the Bay area's ever-worsening traffic which in combination with the outdated zoning laws, makes the whole region an extremely hard place to live in.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."
"Because of the Bay Area’s chronic underinvestment in housing and transit, home prices escalate and congestion worsens. In 2015, for example, the amount of time San Franciscans spent commuting amounted to more than $5.3 million in lost productivity, a 55 percent increase over 2011. The median home price in San Francisco is now a jaw-dropping $1,194,300; in Cupertino, it’s $1,847,800."
The author suggests that the old suburban, car-dependent model for workplaces should be reevaluated and replaced with walkable, bike-able and transit-accessible environments.
While the planning problem might seem Bay Area-specific, cities like Reno or Oklahoma City, clamoring to be “the next Silicon Valley,” can take some lessons from this region to learn what not to do.
9 Comments
Is Allison Arieff a NYT journalist or a big urbanism think tanker? Lines are getting blurrier by the day.
How is Apple's campus doing anything but responding to its context, an infrastructure paradigm of the 1950s that still exists. I prefer the honesty of this campus (with its correctable faults like child care and no public transport) to the fake PR "community" garbage of big urbanism think tanks. If Silicon wants to contribute tangible products to society, they can live in the city, otherwise stay the f--- out in your boring strip malls.
That said, even a rigid design here could catalyze more housing and transportation around its edges if allowed. Better to start with something ambitious than a framework of mediocrity.
I think these projects (especially Apple) are getting this publicity not simply because they are standard office park typologies straight out of the 1950's, but because they are this while publicly claiming to be in some way revolutionary.
The difference between calling someone out and calling someone's bluff.
What the fuck are you talking about Chemex? Do you not think Apple could do better then "respond to its context". Shuttle buses anyone? Urban revitalization anyone?
Or are you just another starry eyed architect drooling over the perfect circle?
My point is the context of Bay Area California is highways and suburbia. Not saying it's good. How exactly could they do better? Build some kind of faux-urban feudal campus? In a way it's probably better for the community to build the company building and then build some apartment buildings in that city than move into already dense and historic San Fran. Or just force people to live nearby instead of the idiots who live in the city and commute to work. Common sense people.
Did you read where it said they have 11,000 parking spaces for 12,000 employees? What kind of message is that sending? I would, quite frankly prefer a "faux-urban feudal campus" (-whatever that means for the way architects talk) than this ginormous spaceship that promotes ass-backwards urbanism.
Everyone's idea of new urbanism more resembles a boring outdoor suburban mall, not New York or Paris (where some thought is put into the architecture).
Think they could have opened up the circle and done better landscaping to bring in outside, but which is better--a nice company building where the workers live elsewhere (integrated into the city) or a banal campus plan where workers live, eat, work in the same place.
The parking seems bad, but it's cool that it's mostly underground. Sadly Apple is probably rich enough to build their own train link into the city. Could easily build some large apartments integrated into the city too.
"Everyone's idea of new urbanism more resembles a boring outdoor suburban mall" ...is that true, or is it just easier to argue against?
This whole big urbanism movement is making me cranky, as is the societal laziness that expects Apple or Elon Musk or Donald Trump or "community" buzzwords to solve all of our problems. There are plenty of tech companies in cities, where they are pushing up rents, concentrating wealth, building nothing of use and killing regulations. Meanwhile the public probably couldn't name their congressman or one current architect. Not a coincidence these problems are deeper than Apple can fix. if only some of that design talent and $$ could be applied to the root issues instead of trying to bring architecture down to the lowest common denominator.
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