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Village makes Silicon Valley corporations seem like home

Wild new corporate architecture designed for people living to and at work reshapes Silicon Valley, especially the Golden Triangle technology district ringed by highways 237, 101, 880 and north to San Mateo along Hwy 101. New projects bigger than their predecessors are better equipped to support a work culture based on communication and collaboration. The best are loaded with aesthetic sophistication rarely seen in Silicon Valley office design. Earlier corporate planners lived and built by unyielding sf costs. Today's facilities czars describe their highest aspirations in terms such as soul. Silicon Valley architecture, not exuberant for the sake of being exuberant, is a product of corporate culture and of companies reinventing themselves. A byproduct of exponential network sector growth, recent campus architecture reflects technology's pace. With few exceptions these new campuses resemble an adolescent industry: gawky, painfully self-aware, eager to grow up. In a region once derided for cookie-cutter office park sameness these bulked-out broad-shouldered campuses are new millennium landmarks, the first monumental statements about Silicon Valley's place at the red-hot networked world center. Archaeologists excavating tech campus ruins centuries from now will find ample evidence Silicon Valley culture was built around sleep deprivation. Major campuses have coffee bars, restaurants, 24-hour health clubs, convenience stores, dry cleaners, but no sleeping. Rationale behind on-campus services is amenities are necessary to recruit and retain the best workers in a hyper-competitive environment.

Ambition: new-breed campus architects and facilities planners speak of their work with urban planning analogies. Instead of cube farms they create healthy neighborhoods, foster communities and steal freely from other architectural disciplines to build formal meeting places and downtowns. Planning analogies create sprawl or sense of community. Concepts of working neighborhoods and community design can scale up to a point beyond which they're untenable. Employees and stockholders love environments with comfortable buildings not shouting for attention, trying too hard to make a statement. Long term it's the best city as opposed to gizmos shouting Look at me, look how stunning I am! Today's campus designs are still shaped by the same constraints shaping the valley's one-style-fits-all tilt-up office plazas: zoning and density restrictions, parking requirements, construction costs. Increasingly, companies building their own campuses consider themselves design partners with architects and builders, expecting the finished product to eloquently express corporate values, the company line in granite and glass. Clients integrating environment with culture want that culture to speak to customers through architecture. Why not? It costs no more to have personality.

Network equipment maker 3Com by Highway 237 at Santa Clara's eastern edge has more fun/sf than any Golden Triangle development except Great America. Its ongoing experimental high-fashion potential of crazy quilt exterior surfaces ranges from high-gloss butcherblock blond wood slabs and metal siding looking like tin cans Jetson funhouse between offices where alpha geeks toil has food, convenience store, health club, other amenities. Not just a workplace but also a massive testament to the fact that Silicon Valley's culture is work. SGI's elegant presentation center is an intimate theater ringed with second-level seats like a nightclub. This high-energy Train Wreck jumble of styles in the 1.4 million-sq-ft campus was built in 3 stages over 10 years. The latest addition, an extraordinary 3-building ultra-mod design sampler, Pee-Wee's Playhouse on steroids and oversize budget, adds 50% more space. 3-Com became more expressive, more willing to be in the forefront of later design phases, visual wallop without an exorbitant price. Design makes buildings look expensive, a small percentage of total cost. Super-luxe touches were used sparingly. Wood is used in one spot out of 300,000 square feet, like a nice dress - elegant, simple, not overdone, a statement without being expensive.

SGI's outdoor cafe's awning colors enliven its 22-acre Amphitheater Technology Center in Mountain View across the road from Shoreline Amphitheater. Stunning design touches sprang from site idiosyncrasies rather than desire to be outrageous. SGI's buildings are open and airy inside and out. 4 sleek buildings and 6 glass-walled Lego towers tightly circle interior grass. Distinctive elevator towers accommodating shallow, environmentally sensitive aquifers under SGI's campus reinforce the campus model for work communities, based on a medieval Tuscany hill town where families built homes around their tower. SGI wanted a community, a high-tech hill town, not a sprawl. Underground parking is at ground level with a berm around it. Silicon Valley designers and architects are obsessed with Italian hill towns. Few companies take it as literally as SGI with its bocce court. People rather dream under Tuscan sun than toil next to bay landfills. Sun's Menlo Park courtyard feels like an Italian piazza. Favorite social settings should be used in corporate environments.

Who needs an office with a door and who's OK in a cubicle divides architects and planners. Studies of how cubes affect communication are inconclusive. Decisions stem from misbegotten notions of how people communicate, or applying one blanket design to everybody. Solutions should depend on people's work. People wanting engineers to communicate more put them in Dilbert cubes. Those doing intense heads-down coding, keeping sets of variables in their heads 20 - 30 minutes at a time, need hard-walled offices. Disturbed they lose their work. People whose jobs depend on such concentration rebel against cubicles. They bring earphones, barricade office openings and avoid times when other people are around. SGI's R&D engineers have office doors. Nobody else does. No exceptions. Research is SGI's heart. SGI's ratio of hard-walled offices to cubicles is 50/50. Offices go to technical staff involved in new product development. Managers from top executives down get cubicles. Hard-walled offices are in building interiors rather than along windows so cubicle-dwellers enjoy maximum natural light. While some networking companies such as Novell use hard-walled offices almost exclusively, 3Com's corporate culture gradually shifts from dedicated private space to shared space. Humans are territorial. Our world more and more will be collaborating teams. Fast-moving competitive pressure eliminates need for isolation.

Internet hardware manufacturer Cisco Systems adds employees at 30% a year. Flexibility means undistinguished buildings with standard features and amenities. If you could predict Cisco going through this much growth and change you'd probably develop a plain vanilla system, intentionally providing flexible, generic spaces without hierarchal difference. Cisco's 2 standard cubicle sizes instead of typical 4 - 6, its buildings flexible electrically, mechanically and communications wise accommodate any group. The valley's most extreme example of explosive network growth, Cisco's 6-year building binge along northernmost San Jose's Tasman Drive outstrips Sarah Winchester's wildest dreams. Along Tasman and side streets Cisco's 28 buildings spread over 4 locations and expects to have 35 buildings. While most campuses are pedestrian, Cisco's Tasman developments move employees between sites by car or shuttle. Largest, richest, most successful computer networker Cisco's corporate culture is of almost unparalleled austerity and self-restraint, phobic about spending a dime on anything nonessential. Endless Tasman Drive blocks of large, solid, sandstone-colored, uniformly unremarkable plain-jane structures imbued with almost Soviet-style lack of imagination show Cisco's desire to be viewed as the most boring company, functional and understated, with a timeless look and not a monument to success. Elegance runs deep in Cisco's rank and file. Cisco employees are also shareholders. Cost control is such an obsession Cisco has an e-mail hot-line for employees to blow the whistle on extravagance. Cisco hopes to keep a lean-and-mean startup mindset despite market capitalization of $200 billion. Fiscal 1998 Cisco was 3 in income and 2 in market capitalization among valley companies. Small start-up companies have no sense of entitlements for people. Growing larger from the CEO on down, people need and want more. Cisco limits that sense of entitlement.

Regardless of classic design or solid materials, no campus is forever. Unrelenting innovation cycles powering valley economy force corporations to make flexibility a top campus design priority. Firms calculate and recalculate campus plans as business conditions change. Contingency leasing surplus space out is a key consideration. Building a good campus and exit strategy can be a zero-sum game. Design factors making a campus work as a cohesive, integrated whole also make individual buildings less appropriate for outside use. Hedge-all-bets mindsets kept valley architecture plodding until now. Part of the valley's identity problem is emphasis on flexible, inexpensive space, essential for companies not imagining a future beyond their next quarterly earnings report. Departments can double in size, split into fragments or disappear while paint dries.

Business network software maker Novell was perceived in the 1990s as losing its technological edge, fading from relevance, dying, on the way out. Microsoft had eaten Novell's lunch. The old Lundy Ave plant, 10 dark, dingy tilt-ups spread out along 3 busy intersections, seemed custom-built to reinforce this has-been identity. Novell planned a hulking 5-building campus on North 1st St at Guadalupe Parkway in San Jose when reorganization shrunk its local workforce from 1,150 positions to under 500. Novell lopped a story off all but 1 building. 2 buildings planned at 5 stories became 4. 2 others planned as 4 became 3. Using exit strategy as entry strategy, Novell put troops in the 2 front buildings and leased out the rest, creating new life and excitement drawing everyone into the buildings without empty offices around. Nice doesn't begin to describe creature comforts $130 million can buy, from lavish stone exteriors to elevator cabs costing as much as a new Lexus. While first impressions may be opulence, the deeper message is reassurance. With every little touch the buildings tell employees Novell's dark, uncertain days are over. Novell stock rose from $7 to $30. The new campus signifies a new life for Novell as a Netcentric company. Building with limestone and granite was one way to send the message Novell would endure, to project a stable image. Novell spent a lot of time, effort and money designing their campus to be timeless and enduring, flying in the face of valley architecture's reputation as fast, fleeting, quickly dated. Novell didn't want to cut corners, making people want to leave. Novell invested more than usual to show employees they're valued, this quality company treats them like quality employees, raising performance levels by giving employees more, with no lowball-everything mentality.

Golden Triangle and Highway 101 campuses may well be the only architectural feature setting Silicon Valley apart from other regions. The best of the new breed, capturing what it's like to live and work in these go-go years with Silicon Valley as the economic engine at the center of the wired world, will someday be regarded as great works, a Mecca where it's happening. Most campus architects and planners are uncomfortable with their designs ultimately being judged in the larger context of valley culture as a whole. Building landmarks is an endeavor fundamentally at odds with a hyper-speed industry redefining itself every 3 months. Thinking about permanence is counterintuitive. Given corporate mandates, is it really the designer's responsibility to make the campus something more than a good office, bringing enjoyment to those seeing it? It's a design obligation to create soul. Anybody can build a building, but to add that extra dimension?

Real estate brokers, architects and corporate planners agree the greatest factor in building corporate campuses is high cost and scarcity of buildable land in Silicon Valley's prime high-tech districts, particularly the Golden Triangle. A square foot of North San Jose commercial land selling for $20 5 years ago now goes for $40. Large parcels for major corporate headquarters are increasingly scarce. The Golden Triangle is full with almost no major parcels available. Companies maximize investment return with taller, denser structures. Sprawling 1-story ranch buildings behind verdant berms is as practical as a 1,200-baud modem. Municipal height and density limits keep tech districts from turning into Manhattan by the Bay. Most floor area ratios dictate that any 100 sq ft of land only supports 35 - 50 sf of office space. Given requisite ground level driveways, landscape, parking it's almost impossible to achieve maximum allowed density with a single, sprawling floor. 2- or 3-story designs, the exception 10 years ago, are now the rule. Where local density caps are looser, 4- or 5-story designs are increasingly common.

Silicon Valley corporate campuses need efficient communication. Old-style office parks are organizational islands, isolated from each other by seas of parking. Campuses are designed to eliminate isolation and encourage interaction. Until recently most valley corporations lived in office parks designed for multiple tenants. Now companies control their own land destiny, designing campuses with their specific organizational needs in mind. Campus designers' holy grail is synergy, the collegial feeling when individuals and groups are arranged for optimal communication. Unlike unyielding floor-area ratios, synergy is a slippery concept. The never-ending quest for it is as much black art as science. Architects invoking the S-word disagree what defines communication-friendly buildings. It's something architects don't do well. Literature and research show organizational teams but very little on how they work with physical space or technical infrastructure. One of Sun's Menlo Park goals was right scale buildings large enough for large research organizations to be cohesive and not so distant from each other that being in the same building became meaningless. People working closely solving problems and developing ideas, not just delivering information, must be together. Teams in 25,000-50,000 sf on one floor are ideal. People on a 300,000 sf floor may not interact intimately. 2 floors is good scale for flexibly designed tech campus buildings. 3 floors is the highest buildable without communication breakdown. There's no industry benchmark for correct floor scale. Sun's ideal is 25,000-50,000 sf, SGI's an intimate 15,000 sf.

Terror threat at odds with architecture

Security Chic. Granite planters, elegant triangles filled with fresh mulch and stiff hedges, are a sign of the times not there to show off shrubbery but defense against truck bombers. They're a permanent reminder of how threats of terrorism altered urban landscapes. Crude barriers erected after Sept 11 are replaced by defensive street furniture without looking defensive.

Few San Francisco downtown buildings stick out as targets. Almost as soon as the attack on the World Trade Center transfixed the nation, white concrete barriers made obstacle courses of the BofA tower, the Transamerica Pyramid and the Market St headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. They remain at the latter two buildings but the view at BofA is now quite different. Besides BofA's planters a new low granite wall is where Kearny and California Sts meet. In the tower's lobby stylish wooden podiums guard the entrance to each elevator bank. They look good, bearing the logo of Shorenstein Co, the tower's manager and co-owner and provide seating for a security guard while sharply narrowing each entrance. Shorenstein Co. officials declined to comment on security measures. Motives are easy to guess. At the Transamerica Pyramid barriers still block sidewalks and fill parking space. The Pyramid's concrete columns hit ground at Montgomery and Washington Sts smack against the sidewalk with no private plaza where discreet barriers can be placed. Building officials met with city bureaucrats to devise something acceptable in the public right-of-way, something substantial that doesn't look like a prison.

Things won't ever go back to how they were. Parks and plazas are closed off to the public for which they were built. Social concerns have always shaped the public realm: benches too narrow to sleep on, metal strips on low walls to deflect skateboarders. Aesthetics of security loomed large at the federal level since 1995 when Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City's federal building. Bollards in the renovated plaza in front of the federal tower at 450 Golden Gate Ave keep vehicles out. It's easier to incorporate design from the start than to double back in self-defense. Washington DC barriers and guardrails are so pervasive a federally appointed task force was dismayed at how our capital is marred by elements more suitable for a highway construction site, communicating fear and retrenchment and undermining the basic premise that underlies a democratic civil society. When Transamerica and the Chronicle shut all but two of their entrances street life eroded ever so slightly. Dead walls don't make for active cities.

On Transamerica's east edge cozy Redwood Park, one of the financial district's most popular lunch spots, was padlocked since Sept 11, reopening later. Nearby lunch spots serving its visitors suffer economic hardship. At another public plaza built by a developer as condition of approval, a visitor stopped by a security guard was told the rooftop space was closed to anyone not a tenant of the building. When told of this the building manager said it was a mistake, the open space was open. How many other people were turned away? The issue isn't whether new planters look fitting or whether some buildings try to skirt legal obligations. It's that the public realm shouldn't be held hostage to paranoia. Needed vigilance will alter our surroundings. America remains a terrorist target regardless. Richness of urban life comes from being open to the public. If we sacrifice that, we've sacrificed too much.