"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." — gawker.com

Facebook recently got a big blue thumbs up from the Menlo Park Planning Commission to build its sprawling Frank Gehry-designed headquarters. Along with the requisite rezoning for the design, the commission approved the project’s environmental impact report, an official statement concluding that the new development would have more positive than negative effects on the area, and a cartographical change that will create a private road in front of the property called “Facebook Way.” — blogs.artinfo.com

“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

Garages, of course, hold a storied place in Silicon Valley lore. Think Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG), which all started in garages.
The start-up garage is a powerful symbol of the do-it-yourself underdog, and the creative, collaborative and scrappy culture they hope to reinforce through the renovation of the 57-acre former Sun Microsystems campus and new construction on an adjacent 22-acre parcel over the next few years. — MercuryNews

Brazilian real estate developer Gafisa decided to ask people directly, what they want in their new apartments? Launched last week, the Edifício Colaborativo (Collaborative Building) initiative transformed the company’s fan page on Facebook in a crowdsourcing platform, intended to harvest innovative ideas for a new building. — PSFK