New corporate architecture is designed for people living to and at work. Building by building, wild new corporate architecture reshapes Silicon Valley's face. Metamorphosis is most apparent in the Golden Triangle, the technology district ringed by highways 237, 101, 880 and north to San Mateo along the 101 corridor. 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. Where previous generations of corporate planners lived and built by unyielding sq-ft costs today's facilities czars describe their highest aspirations with terms such as soul. Silicon Valley architecture is not exuberant for the sake of being exuberant. It's a product of corporate culture and of companies reinventing themselves. It reflects the pace of the technology industry. Recent campus architecture is a byproduct of exponential growth within the networking sector. With few exceptions these new campuses tell the story of 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 the new millennium's landmarks, the first monumental statements about Silicon Valley's place at the red-hot center of the networked world. Archaeologists picking through 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 place to sleep. Rationale behind on-campus services is amenities are necessary to recruit and retain the best workers in a hyper-competitive environment.
PERSONALITY - It's a telling measure of ambition that new-breed campus architects and facilities planners speak of their work with urban planning analogies. Not building cube farms, they create healthy neighborhoods, foster communities and steal freely from other architectural disciplines to build formal meeting places and downtowns. Town planning analogies create sprawl or a 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. Over the long haul 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.
NIGHTCLUB - Networking equipment maker 3Com, hard by Highway 237 at Santa Clara's eastern edge, has more fun per square foot than any Golden Triangle development except Great America. Its ongoing experiment concerns high-fashion potential of butcher-block slabs and tin cans. This Jetsonian funhouse between offices where alpha-geeks toil has eating experiences, convenience store, health club, other amenities. Not just a workplace it's also a massive testament to the fact that the heart of Silicon Valley culture is work. SGI's elegant presentation center is an intimate theater ringed with a second level of 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 the last decade. The latest addition, adding 50% to the total sq ft, is an extraordinary 3-building ultra-mod design sampler, Pee-Wee's Playhouse on steroids and an oversize budget. The crazy quilt of exterior surfaces ranges from high-gloss blond wood to metal siding looking like tin cans. 3-Com became more expressive over years, more willing to be in the forefront of design in later phases. Its visual wallop didn't come at an exorbitant price. You can make a statement and not be expensive. 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.
Color in SGI's outdoor cafe's awnings 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.
Most coveted amenity
An office with a door. Who needs an office and who gets by in a cubicle divides architects and planners. Studies on how cubes affect communication are inconclusive. Decisions generally have to do with misbegotten notions about 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 needing hard-walled offices do intense, heads-down coding keep sets of variables in their heads 20 - 30 minutes at a time. 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 gets their own door. 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 are in cubicles. Hard-walled offices are set in building interiors rather than along windows, giving cubicle-dwellers the best position to 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 inherit strong territorial feelings but the world we live in more and more will be collaborating teams. Fast-moving competitive pressure will eliminate need for isolation.
A Gift to be Simple
Cisco Systems manufactures Internet hardware. Adding employees at 30% a year, flexibility means undistinguished buildings with standardized features and amenities. If you had a crystal ball to predict that Cisco would go through this much growth and change you'd probably develop a plain vanilla system, intentionally providing flexible, generic spaces without hierarchal difference. Cisco has 2 standard cubicle sizes instead of typical 4 - 6, its buildings flexible electrically, mechanically and communications wise to 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 are an auto culture, moving employees between sites by car or shuttle.
Cisco, the largest, richest, most successful computer networker, is also home to a corporate culture of almost unparalleled austerity and self-restraint, phobic about spending dime one on anything nonessential. Endless Tasman Drive blocks of large, solid, sandstone-colored, uniformly unremarkable plain-jane structures imbued with an 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 within Cisco's rank and file. Cisco employees are also shareholders. Cost-containment 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. At the close of fiscal 1998 Cisco was 3 in income and 2 in market capitalization among valley companies. Small companies in start-up mode have no sense of entitlements for people. Growing larger from the CEO on down, people develop this sense of needing and wanting more. Cisco limits that sense of entitlement.
EXIT - 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.
REENTRY - Business network software maker Novell was generally 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.
Soul of a new building
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 pay attention to responsibility as planners to create soul. Anybody can put a building together. You're willing to add that extra dimension?
DESIGN - Real estate brokers, architects and corporate planners agree the greatest single 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 partially hidden by 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 sq ft 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 find the 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 sq ft on one floor are ideal. People on a 300,000 sq ft floor may not interact intimately. Consensus is 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 sq ft, SGI's an intimate 15,000 sq ft.