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A Menlo Park company called Katerra announced that it had acquired Michael Green Architecture, a 25-person architecture firm in Vancouver, British Columbia. On June 12, the company revealed that it had bought another, larger architecture firm, Atlanta-based Lord Aeck Sargent. This comes five months after Katerra raised $865 million in venture capital from funders led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which has also invested heavily in the co-working startup WeWork. — City Lab
Startup Katerra looks to revolutionize the construction industry through streamlining the entire process with their design-build model. The company has acquired Michael Green Architecture, known for designing tall wood buildings, and Lord Aeck Sargent. With these two firms obtained, Katerra... View full entry
Facebook is testing the proposition: Do people love tech companies so much they will live inside of them? When the project was announced last summer, critics dubbed it Facebookville or, in tribute to company co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Zucktown. [...] If Facebook’s image is permanently sullied by the furor over Cambridge Analytica, the data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Zucktown will falter before it is finished. — The New York Times
Like Google's Sidewalk Labs for Toronto and Bill Gates' proposed smart city in Arizona, Facebook is working to make their own housing development, Willow Village, a living reality in Silicon Valley. Nicknamed “Zucktown” and “Facebookville” by critics, the project will occupy a 59-acre... View full entry
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. — The Upshot
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... View full entry
Google on Wednesday unveiled its plans for a striking new development in Sunnyvale’s Moffett Park, where thousands of the company’s employees could work in more than 1 million square feet of offices. The search giant filed a proposal with Sunnyvale city officials late Wednesday for a two-building, 1.04 million square foot project, called Caribbean, that would be large enough to accommodate 4,500 Google workers. — mercurynews.com
Google's massive expansion plan in Sunnyvale include two buildings designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Renderings of the new project show a complex named the Caribbean featuring long inclines allowing employees to walk, bike, or skate to any level of the building. Located on Caribbean... View full entry
While the new Apple Campus still remains incomplete, Apple is moving forward with hosting the launch of their new iPhone 8 on site. The company sent out a media invite last Thursday with the tagline, "Let's meet at our place," confirming the location of the event. It will be the first time Apple... View full entry
Facebook announced today that it has partnered with OMA to design the masterplan for Willow Campus, a mixed-use neighborhood adjacent to their existing headquarters in Menlo Park. "The first official step will be the filing of our plan with Menlo Park in July 2017. We will begin more formal... View full entry
California’s Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country’s food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley. — The Guardian
As home prices rise staggeringly high in Silicon Valley and San Jose, aspiring homeowners have increasingly headed inland to the agricultural regions of the Central Valley, which lie alongside the I-5. In towns like Patterson, rents have risen from $900 to $1,600 over three years, forcing more and... View full entry
Silicon Valley is in the midst of something of a building boom with several of the tech giants commissioning new headquarters from big-name architects. First came Facebook with a campus designed by Frank Gehry. Next, Apple got Lord Norman Foster to design a spacecraft-like, donut-shaped building... View full entry
Recorded in the wake of Tuesday's election results, this episode got a bit emotional. Fred Scharmen—designer, researcher, and assistant professor at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning in Baltimore—joins us to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of a technocratic... View full entry
Lenders often give special treatment to the wealthy, of course, but the tech industry has created a particularly ripe crop of clients who are rich or on their way. [...]
“Lenders get so caught up trying to stay competitive and finding a market edge, they basically allow greed to overcome common sense ... Easy money does fuel and accelerate the inevitable bubble.”
— bloomberg.com
Related on Archinect:Facebook enters the housing market – and it's probably not a good thingGoogle acquires LinkedIn's HQ in huge, unexpected property swapWhat's the newest project for Silicon Valley investors? Building citiesSilicon Valley is set to get over 10K more housing units – is this... View full entry
Facebook could be your next landlord. In an effort to drum up support for the controversial expansion of its headquarters, the social media giant is trying to give back to the community by building at least 1,500 housing units that can be rented by the general public—not just Facebook employees [...]
Facebook has pledged that 15 percent of the new units it creates will go to low- or middle-income families.
— Gizmodo
...Which is great until you realize that 85 percent of the building will probably be ridiculously expensive and probably populated by local tech bros.For more on Silicon Valley urbanism, check out these links:Silicon Valley campuses at risk as sea levels riseMark Zuckerberg's resolution for... View full entry
[Google and LinkedIn] announced a large, surprising property swap encompassing over three million square feet of existing and future real estate...
From Google, LinkedIn is picking up seven buildings...In return, Google is getting LinkedIn’s Mountain View headquarters office and...four different surrounding properties that enable Google to follow through on its ambitious plan for a new, green, crazy-futurist campus.
— recode
Following an unsuccessful bid last year, this is good news for Google as they continue to push toward making their dream campus a reality. Unleash the “crabots”.Previously on Archinect:Archinect Sessions Episode #19: Don't be Evil, Don't Throw StonesGoogle loses to LinkedIn in Silicon Valley... View full entry
Y Combinator, the startup accelerator and investment firm that helped produce Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart, is embarking on a creation project arguably more ambitious than any company.
"We want to build cities," wrote Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung and President Sam Altman...the project aims to develop ways to reduce housing expenses by 90 percent and to develop a city code of laws simple enough to fit on 100 pages of text. Eventually the plan is to actually produce a prototype city.
— Bloomberg
"We’re not trying to build a utopia for techies," says Cheung, the project’s director and the former CEO of failed housecleaning startup Homejoy. "This is a city for humans."For more news from Silicon Valley, check out these links:Silicon Valley campuses at risk as sea levels riseSilicon... View full entry
Sea level forecasts by a coalition of scientists show that the Silicon Valley bases for Facebook, Google and Cisco are at risk of being cut off or even flooded, even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe sea level increases.
Without significant adaptation, Facebook’s new campus appears most at risk.
— the Guardian
San Francisco to mandate solar panels for new constructionsWhile the Frank Gehry-designed campus was elevated to prevent flooding, even a 1.6 ft rise – on the low end of predictions – will "inundate" the campus. Google is a little better off but will also be swamped if the Antarctic ice sheet... View full entry
Last week the city council in Mountain View, California, took a significant step toward addressing Silicon Valley's housing affordability crisis. The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase
[...]
— Vox
"The big question is whether this represents an isolated victory for housing advocates or whether it's the start of a trend toward denser development in Silicon Valley more broadly."For more on the housing woes of the world's tech capital, check out these links:Can Silicon Valley save the Bay... View full entry
