In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...]
In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area.
— Marin Independent Journal
Taking architectural anachronism to a whole new level, Twitter turns the open-plan office on its head by installing original one-room wood cabins from Montana as lunching spaces. Designers for Twitter's offices feel the choice is coherent with the company values of reuse and reclamation, while also strengthening the brand's bird imagery as related to the forest/nature.
What's left behind is the sour sense of irony coating such a move. In a city fuming with affordable housing and gentrification disputes, it's a bit hilarious for Twitter to insert original homesteading-iconography into its own HQ.
1 Comment
This is kinda gross. Not only in the direct relationship between homesteading at great risk and the demeaned yet unaffordable environment that the natural beauty of California has now become, but also because they're being used for dining rooms. The cabins would have been better as yoga rooms (which they are also building) - personally I don't like eating presumably hygienic food next to a scrabbly splintery wood wall coated in decades of campfire and grease. I'm all for reuse and patina, but it needs to be done smartly.
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