ON AUGUST 27, 1976, SCIENTISTS FROM SRI INTERNATIONAL CELEBRATED THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF TESTS BY SENDING AN ELECTRONIC MESSAGE FROM A COMPUTER SET UP AT A PICNIC TABLE BEHIND THE ALPINE INN. THE MESSAGE WAS SENT VIA A RADIO NETWORK TO SRI AND ON THROUGH A SECOND NETWORK, THE ARPANET, TO BOSTON. THIS EVENT MARKED THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERNET AGE.
That the world’s first e-mail was sent from a picnic table outside at Zott’s goes well with the rest of Silicon Valley lore, like the founding of Hewlett-Packard in one garage and Apple in another. It reminds you that for a long time the most striking thing about the appearance of Silicon Valley was how ordinary it was, how much it looked like everyplace else, or at least like every other collection of reasonably prosperous American suburbs, whatever may have been going on in its garages and whatever some geeks may have done over beers at Zott’s 37 years ago. Yes, Silicon Valley has Stanford, with its vast and beautiful campus, and some handsome mountain scenery marking its western edge, but the rest of the place has always been made up of neighborhoods and landmarks that could have been almost anywhere else, like the 101 Freeway and the strip malls and supermarkets and car dealerships and motels and low-rise office parks. Most of Silicon Valley is suburban sprawl, plain and simple, its main artery a wide boulevard called El Camino Real that might someday possess some degree of urban density but now could be on the outskirts of Phoenix. Zott’s is what passes for local color, but even this spirited roadhouse has a certain generic look to it. You could imagine it being almost anywhere out West, the same way that so much of Silicon Valley looks like generic suburbia.
And even after a few people began doing unusual things in their garages, and other people started inventing things in the university’s laboratories, and even after some of these turned into the beginnings of large corporations, some of which became successful beyond anyone’s imagination—even these things didn’t make Silicon Valley look all that different from everyplace else. The tech companies got bigger and bigger, but that has generally just meant that the sprawl sprawled farther. There was certainly nothing about the physical appearance of these few square miles that told you it was the place that had generated more wealth than anywhere else in our time.
Until now, that is. In June of 2011, four months before his death, Steve Jobs appeared before the City Council of Cupertino, where Apple’s headquarters are located. It was the last public appearance Jobs would make, and if it did not have quite the orchestrated panache of his carefully staged product unveilings in San Francisco, it was fixed even more on the future than the latest iPhone. Jobs was presenting the designs for a new headquarters building that Apple proposed to build, and that the City Council would have to approve. It was a structure unlike any other that his company, or any other in the world, had ever built: a glass building in the shape of a huge ring, 1,521 feet in diameter (or nearly five football fields), and its circumference would curve for nearly a mile. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster, the British-born architect known for the elegance of his work and for the uncompromising nature of his sleek, modern aesthetic—close to Jobs’s own. In a community that you could almost say has prided itself on its indifference to architecture, Apple, which had already changed the nature of consumer products, seemed now to want to try to do nothing less than change Silicon Valley’s view of what buildings should be.
That the world’s first e-mail was sent from a picnic table outside at Zott’s goes well with the rest of Silicon Valley lore, like the founding of Hewlett-Packard in one garage and Apple in another. It reminds you that for a long time the most striking thing about the appearance of Silicon Valley was how ordinary it was, how much it looked like everyplace else, or at least like every other collection of reasonably prosperous American suburbs, whatever may have been going on in its garages and whatever some geeks may have done over beers at Zott’s 37 years ago. Yes, Silicon Valley has Stanford, with its vast and beautiful campus, and some handsome mountain scenery marking its western edge, but the rest of the place has always been made up of neighborhoods and landmarks that could have been almost anywhere else, like the 101 Freeway and the strip malls and supermarkets and car dealerships and motels and low-rise office parks. Most of Silicon Valley is suburban sprawl, plain and simple, its main artery a wide boulevard called El Camino Real that might someday possess some degree of urban density but now could be on the outskirts of Phoenix. Zott’s is what passes for local color, but even this spirited roadhouse has a certain generic look to it. You could imagine it being almost anywhere out West, the same way that so much of Silicon Valley looks like generic suburbia.
And even after a few people began doing unusual things in their garages, and other people started inventing things in the university’s laboratories, and even after some of these turned into the beginnings of large corporations, some of which became successful beyond anyone’s imagination—even these things didn’t make Silicon Valley look all that different from everyplace else. The tech companies got bigger and bigger, but that has generally just meant that the sprawl sprawled farther. There was certainly nothing about the physical appearance of these few square miles that told you it was the place that had generated more wealth than anywhere else in our time.
Until now, that is. In June of 2011, four months before his death, Steve Jobs appeared before the City Council of Cupertino, where Apple’s headquarters are located. It was the last public appearance Jobs would make, and if it did not have quite the orchestrated panache of his carefully staged product unveilings in San Francisco, it was fixed even more on the future than the latest iPhone. Jobs was presenting the designs for a new headquarters building that Apple proposed to build, and that the City Council would have to approve. It was a structure unlike any other that his company, or any other in the world, had ever built: a glass building in the shape of a huge ring, 1,521 feet in diameter (or nearly five football fields), and its circumference would curve for nearly a mile. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster, the British-born architect known for the elegance of his work and for the uncompromising nature of his sleek, modern aesthetic—close to Jobs’s own. In a community that you could almost say has prided itself on its indifference to architecture, Apple, which had already changed the nature of consumer products, seemed now to want to try to do nothing less than change Silicon Valley’s view of what buildings should be.
That the proposed building was received with great enthusiasm was no surprise; a small suburban city like Cupertino is rarely going to stand in the way of whatever its largest taxpayer wants to do, and the building, after all, was one of Steve Jobs’s dying wishes. What was more surprising was that not long after Apple unveiled Foster’s audacious design, which it expects to start constructing soon and to occupy in 2016, Facebook decided that it, too, needed more space, and after searching several months for an architect, the company hired Frank Gehry, one of the few architects in the world who is even better known than Foster, and set him to work on a massive building of its own. Gehry’s Facebook building is intended in some ways to be the antithesis of Foster’s for Apple. It will be set lower into the ground and will be covered entirely by roof gardens: a building that will blend into the landscape rather than hover over it like an alien spacecraft. (From the minute the design became public, people have been calling the Apple building the “spaceship.”) But Facebook’s project is not exactly what you would call modest: underneath those gardens will be what might be the largest office in the world, a single room so gargantuan that it will accommodate up to 10,000 workers.
A few months after Facebook unveiled Gehry’s project, in the summer of 2012, Google, the biggest company of all, which until then had been operating solely out of existing buildings that it had renovated to suit its purposes, announced that it, too, was going to build something from scratch. Google had canceled a new building designed by the German architect Christoph Ingenhoven earlier that year, but after the Facebook announcement the company turned again to the idea of putting up a new building, as if it could not be left out of this latest form of Silicon Valley competition. In the architecture arms race, Google’s long-standing practice of taking over old suburban office buildings—and sometimes even entire office parks—scooping out their insides, and replacing them with lively, entertaining innards was no longer enough. Google hired NBBJ, a prominent Seattle-based firm—take that, Microsoft!—and set it to work on a new complex to add to the dozens of low-rise buildings it already occupies in the town of Mountain View.
All of this activity suggests that Silicon Valley now wants to grow up, at least architecturally. But it remains to be seen whether this wave of ambitious new construction will give the tech industry the same kind of impact on the built environment that it has had on almost every other aspect of modern life—or even whether these new projects will take Silicon Valley itself out of the realm of the conventional suburban landscape. One might hope that buildings and neighborhoods where the future is being shaped might reflect a similar sense of innovation. Even a little personality would be nice.
by Paul Goldberger, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Apple, Inc.
