“Mark said he wanted to be in the same room with all his engineers,” Gehry said. “I told him we could put the building up on stilts, park cars underneath and create a room as large as he wanted.”
This is not a Gehry project of shiny fronds of fluttering reflective metal. To support his vision of anti-hierarchy, free- form collaborative work, Zuckerberg tapped the Gehry who has built furniture out of cardboard and covered his own house in chain-link fencing.
— bloomberg.com
4 Comments
The devotion to horizontal space in the pursuit of collaboration leaves Facebook stuck in Menlo Park’s land of interaction-repelling office parks. Half the company’s staff lives in San Francisco where the city hosts human networking far richer than the most brilliantly designed office environment does.
You can’t find room for a 10-acre floor in the densely built-up city, though. Facebook shuttles city dwellers 30 miles to its campus with its own bus fleet.
i wonder if open plan-horizontal space is so necessary...? Presumably it works for them. toaster, do you think "Half the company’s staff lives in San Francisco where the city hosts human networking far richer than the most brilliantly designed office environment does." is a clear argument for urbanism over architecture?
nam - part of it is the difficulty of balancing security with collaboration. last thing facebook wants is a couple of their engineers blabbing about a confidential project while they're on their lunch break at a san-fran coffee shop - but they're also trying to recreate that urban (horizontally dense) atmosphere within their own campus - if there was housing it would be a contemporary Fordlandia. Ironically, if Zuckerberg had stayed in Boston he'd have found enough space in the seaport district.
also - I think BIG might have been a better choice for solving the anti-hierarchical problem in an urban setting.
I dunno - the more I hear about facebook, the more I think they're going to end up like yahoo.
Why not build a real city/town tied to a virtual city as a parti (point of departure) and complete the loop from physical to virtual - you know have a piazza and a harbor a la Portofino - at least in metaphor.
Have the physical space mirror the virtual and vice versa.
Have a little roll to the land and a hill - maybe some city walls.
Transcend being an office park and become a real place with apartments and a mixed use environment - yes we know security, security, security from corporate central - security is an illusion when you do not have trust.
Give everyone an implant.
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