January 2014 Issue

The Shape of Things to Come

In 2011, after decades in which Silicon Valley had seemed to care no more about its surroundings than about its clothes, Steve Jobs announced he had hired Sir Norman Foster to design a vast new Apple headquarters. Facebook soon commissioned an equally massive building from Frank Gehry. Google followed suit, along with Amazon, up north. As the tech industry finally turns its attention to architecture, Paul Goldberger explores what companies’ choices reveal about their cultures, their workforces, and the shifting relationship between city and suburbs.
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On Alpine Road in Portola Valley, a few miles southwest of the campus of Stanford University, where the flat suburban landscape begins to give way to the vistas of the Santa Cruz Mountains, there is an old wooden roadhouse called the Alpine Inn, where college students drink beer and wine at old wooden tables carved with initials. It’s as if Mory’s, the venerable Yale hangout, were housed in a western frontier tavern out of a John Wayne movie. The locals, who call the place Zott’s, a contraction of Rossotti’s, the name of long-ago owners, claim it has the best hamburgers for miles around, but what makes the place notable isn’t what it serves. Affixed to the wall near the front door is a small bronze plaque that reads:

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 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.

Inward-Bound

In Silicon Valley, almost every town is a company town. As Cupertino belongs to Apple and Mountain View is dominated overwhelmingly by Google, Menlo Park is where Facebook is located, and Palo Alto has the old, troubled, but still-enormous Hewlett-Packard. Yet you don’t always feel this. Tech companies tend to look inward; they seem to like campuses more than cities or even towns. Gehry’s Facebook building will be across the street from the company’s existing complex, which will be retained. Apple occupies more than 30 low-rise buildings in Cupertino, with the corporate headquarters in a cluster of modern glass buildings that bears the invented address of 1 Infinite Loop. The address tells you as much as you need to know about the company’s view of its campus as a self-contained environment, disconnected from the city around it, a goal that the new, Foster-designed building will achieve more fully, surely, than any building since the Pentagon, which it exceeds in circumference. The current Apple offices, which were originally put up by a real-estate developer in the early 1970s for the company Four Phase Systems, are notable less for anything about their architecture than for their exceptionally elegant signs in a small Myriad font, the identical typeface to that used on most of the company’s products. Oracle, the huge software company, built itself a kind of high-rise campus, a cluster of rounded, reflective glass towers beside the 101 Freeway a few miles north in Redwood Shores—more conspicuous than any of the old Google buildings, to be sure, but nearly as generic, since you could imagine these buildings sitting beside a freeway in Dallas or Houston as easily as on the San Francisco peninsula. They’re no more specific to Silicon Valley than the Alpine Inn.

For a while, indifference to the physical world seemed an inherent part of the identity of Silicon Valley. In the same way that you don’t expect computer geeks to pay much attention to their wardrobes, it didn’t seem odd that the Valley towns had a dull, Anywhere U.S.A. veneer, or that the biggest and most successful companies seemed to operate out of low-rise buildings that looked as if they had been built off the Long Island Expressway to house insurance agencies. It wasn’t just because most of them started out on a shoestring and took what space they could, progressing from the garage to random office space wherever they could find it. It was also because, Steve Jobs aside, most people in Silicon Valley didn’t care much about what things looked like. Buildings were a kind of “whatever,” just like clothing, which is why the first Silicon Valley structures were to architecture as the fleece vest or hoodie is to haberdashery.

And anyway, the real world is a kind of sideshow when your mission is to shape the virtual world. The goal of so much that has been invented in Silicon Valley is to take our consciousness away from the physical world, to create for us an alternative that we can experience by turning aside from the physical world and into the entirely different realm that all this technology was creating. When you are designing the virtual world and can make it whatever you want it to be, why waste your time worrying about what real buildings and real towns should look like?

But if the first generation of tech workplaces, back in the long-ago 1980s, was, for all intents and purposes, devoid of character, it wasn’t too long before some companies got too big and too successful to disappear entirely into suburban banality. A few Silicon Valley companies, most famously Google, figured out another way to escape from the real world. Instead of ignoring it altogether, they could make it fun, silly, and exuberant, entertaining in a way that would pull employees away from the everyday physical environment as much as the virtual realms they were helping to create. When I recently visited Building 43 at Google’s main complex, in Mountain View, part of an office park the company took over from Silicon Graphics in 2003, the first thing I saw, suspended over a large, open stairway behind the reception area, was an exact, full-size replica of the suborbital plane Richard Branson envisions using for the commercial space travel he has promised to offer someday on Virgin Galactic: a gargantuan toy to remind you, should there be any doubt, that you are not in a place that is bound by the rules that govern other places.

Of course, Google has plenty of its own rules, including, as is the norm in Silicon Valley, tight security, and a requirement that you accept (via a touch screen at the reception desk) what amounts to a non-disclosure agreement, before you are allowed to get to the person you have come to see, promising not to reveal any confidential information that you might pick up on your visit. (Even Goldman Sachs doesn’t make you do that to get past its sentries.) The space within looks like … well, if an undergraduate publication had more than 15,000 staffers (the reported number of Google employees in Mountain View), it might resemble these Google buildings: a sprawling, amiable jumble of cubicles, alcoves, fabric partitions, sofas, meeting spaces, Ping-Pong tables, pool tables, and conference rooms made of temporary walls. (The employees call them yurts.) Here and there are some solid walls, often painted in bright colors, and every so often the space is punctuated by a small café dispensing free food. (There are more than 30 such cafés scattered around the complex.) I saw some private massage rooms, and there are treadmills designed to hold a laptop computer. It goes without saying that there are very few private offices. Everything is designed to be flexible so that, when project teams shift, the workspace can be reconfigured.

The place plays at being relaxed, but it positively overflows with high-minded virtue. The stairway over which the spaceship is hung is made of “sustainably farmed rain-forest wood from Brazil,” Katelin Jabbari, the Google spokesperson who showed me around, told me. Sustainability is considered so important by the company that “we have our own healthy-materials list,” she said, which specifies what can and cannot be used in all Google facilities. Eventually, she said, every Google building “will be like a grocery store: you will walk in and see an ingredient list.” When I parked my car, I noticed that the spaces closest to the building were all reserved as electric-car charging stations. One was occupied by a new Tesla Model S, flanked by a pair of Chevy Volts. To reach the front door of Building 43 you walk past an organic garden, taking care not to be knocked over by someone riding one of the shared bicycles that employees use to move around the campus. There are multiple outdoor beach-volleyball courts.

“Here we want the physical world to function by the same rules as the virtual world, to represent transparency and community,” Jabbari said. The re-do of Building 43 was by the firm Studios, which designed the energetic headquarters of Bloomberg, in New York; that workplace is as close as the East Coast has come to replicating the aggressively casual spirit of Google. (There are no private offices at Bloomberg, and there’s also plenty of free food.) A number of other Silicon Valley companies have tried for the same tone: big, brightly colored, wide-open workspaces that look like a cross between a trading floor and a pre-school. The furniture is often arranged in clusters to facilitate project teams, and people move around constantly. Free food, by now the standard currency in Silicon Valley, is rampant, and so are fitness centers: you almost never have to leave.

That, naturally, is part of the idea. Flexible hours often become extremely long hours, especially when much of the staff is young, and all that free stuff encourages employees, many of whom live in fairly basic surroundings, to spend more time in the office working: if you’re a Google staffer and your name is not Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Eric Schmidt, the odds are that your workspace is nicer to be in than your home. And when the time finally comes to go home, Google, Facebook, Apple, the video-game maker Electronic Arts, Yahoo, and the other big Silicon Valley companies have their own way of taking you there. All of these companies operate huge fleets of private luxury buses that shuttle back and forth between the Valley and San Francisco, where increasing numbers of techies prefer to live. Sparing employees the unpleasantness of a 40-mile commute along the crowded freeway, the buses are sleek, enormous, and unmarked except for electronic lettering over the windshield indicating which neighborhood in San Francisco the bus is bound for—the Mission, Noe Valley, the Castro, Potrero Hill. Most of them are white, but the Apple buses, not surprisingly, are silver. They all carry bicycles, and it goes without saying that they are all Wi-Fi-equipped. When an employee gets on the Apple or Facebook or Google bus in the morning, he is considered to be at work.

Google alone transports upwards of 3,000 employees a day on its bus service, which, like those of other companies, is now so broad-based it extends beyond San Francisco to destinations all over the Bay Area. The buses have become a necessity for Silicon Valley, not because they expand the workday modestly, but because today so many young workers in the tech industry have no desire to live in the Valley. A 28-year-old with a place in Noe Valley is more likely to be willing to spend time on a luxurious bus with Wi-Fi than to want to sit behind the wheel of a car on the 101 Freeway, or to make his way to downtown San Francisco to take a commuter train that will deposit him at a station that is still likely to be several miles from where he works. (There are also tech-industry vans that pick up from the Valley’s train stations, and Santa Clara County has a struggling light-rail system that connects some places to some other places.) But the big intercity buses have become the travel system of choice, so much so that Craigslist ads for apartments in San Francisco’s trendier neighborhoods now carry lines like “Genentech, Google, and Apple buses within a block,” which signals a location that is a lot more meaningful to potential tenants than proximity to the public transit system.

Tech Bubbles

The growing preference of younger workers to live in cities represents a vast shift in the culture of the tech industry, and its effect is only beginning to be understood. It has certainly not escaped Amazon, which recently announced plans to construct new headquarters in downtown Seattle, also designed by NBBJ, the firm working with Google. The design consists of a trio of glass towers surrounding three enormous glass spheres. The spheres, which are of different sizes and seem to meld together, look like Buckminster Fuller domes that someone has blown out of a soap-bubble pipe. The towers, sadly, are banal, and look more like they were made to house lawyers and investment bankers than tech workers, and it is equally discouraging that the glass spheres, however much visual pop they will bring to the cityscape, will house a conference-and-dining center for the company, not public space (aside from a small dog park). The complex looks as if it will have none of the casual, somewhat funky street life that for a long time was a defining element of Seattle’s urbanism. But whatever its architectural shortcomings, the new headquarters clearly represent Amazon’s intention to cast its lot firmly with the city—where it has been located since its founding, in 1994—in notable contrast to Seattle’s other huge tech employer, Microsoft, which has been headquartered entirely in suburban Redmond for the past 27 years.

Then again, Redmond is some 16 miles away from downtown Seattle, which has always made it much easier for Microsoft employees to commute from the city than their counterparts in Silicon Valley companies. Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford University, and until a few years ago it seemed to have only the most tenuous relationship to San Francisco. The law firms and venture-capital firms that service the tech industry located themselves along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, beside Stanford, in quarters that were posher than those of the start-ups but every bit as suburban. The Rosewood Sand Hill, the luxury hotel whose restaurant, Madera, is to the tech industry what Michael’s in New York is to the media industry, is a sprawling, low-rise resort that looks and feels as if it could be in a prosperous midwestern suburb but for the slight overlay of buzz that fills the dining room, and the fact that the parking lot has more BMWs and Audis, not to mention Teslas, than you would find in Kansas City. If you were a venture capitalist or corporate executive in the tech industry, you were likely to live in a fancy suburb such as Atherton or Woodside; if you were a young software engineer, you lived in a garden apartment in Cupertino or Mountain View, with maybe an occasional dinner on University Avenue in Palo Alto, a dense strip of restaurants and stores that is as close as the Valley comes to having a real street that people actually walk on. San Francisco is nearly an hour north on the 101 Freeway—if you weren’t traveling at rush hour, that is—but other than big events such as the annual Macworld expo and Apple’s celebrated product debuts at the Moscone convention center, much of Silicon Valley acted as if the city were as distant as Los Angeles.

The high cost and limited availability of housing in Silicon Valley towns may have had something to do with the gradual shift toward San Francisco, but it’s not as though housing is either plentiful or cheap in San Francisco, which has long been one of the most expensive cities in the country. What’s really fueling it is the much larger trend of younger professionals expressing a preference for metropolitan living, even after they start families. The needs and tastes of what the urban-studies theorist Richard Florida has somewhat simplistically dubbed the “creative class” may not explain everything about the resurgence of older city neighborhoods all across the country, but it says plenty about why a 30-year-old video-game designer would now rather live in San Francisco than Mountain View, whatever the commute. At this point the tech companies’ bus services are not just a convenience or a recruiting tool but an essential piece of infrastructure on which the massive exercise in reverse commuting that has come to define Silicon Valley depends.

The connection between Silicon Valley and San Francisco seems to be deepening all the time, in unexpected ways. It’s no longer a case of city versus suburb; if anything, their traditional roles have been reversed, since the Valley now represents the region’s main economic engine, while the city acts as the place of entertainment, socializing, and sleep. “San Francisco, with its leafy parks and charming row houses and distinct villages and locavore restaurants and commuters fleeing every morning to work, is the Brooklyn to an as-yet-unbuilt Manhattan,” Ken Layne, the journalist and blogger, wrote in January in the online journal the Awl.

The Valley’s richest entrepreneurs have always seen San Francisco that way: some of them bought houses years ago in Pacific Heights and some of the city’s other posh districts as weekend getaways. But the torrent of twenty- and thirtysomethings wanting to live in San Francisco full-time is a much more recent development, and it says a lot more about the role of cities today. They aren’t essential as marketplaces, the way they were a hundred years ago, when you needed the city to do business. You can do business anywhere, as the success of Silicon Valley proves. But the things the city does offer—a lively, diverse environment full of visual stimulation, culture, food, and all kinds of people—is exactly what suburbs can’t provide, even when they get as rich and successful as the ones in Silicon Valley. “As disappointed visitors and new employees discover, Silicon Valley is a dull and ugly landscape of low-rise stucco office parks and immense traffic-clogged boulevards. The fancy restaurants are in strip malls. . . . There is nothing to do, nowhere to go,” Layne wrote in the Awl.

That’s surely why more and more start-ups and small to medium-size companies are locating or relocating in San Francisco instead of Silicon Valley. The city itself is a powerful recruiting tool. “The younger people want to be in the city,” Karen Wickre, a veteran of Google who now serves as Twitter’s editorial director, told me. “I don’t miss my nine-year commute to Google.” Last year, when Twitter, which has been based in San Francisco since it was founded, in 2006, decided it needed new space, it took over three floors in a vast, empty Art Deco building, originally a furniture mart, on a seedy section of Market Street not far from San Francisco’s City Hall. From the reaction in the neighborhood you could have thought it was Google that had arrived, not Twitter. Within a few months of the company’s announcement in 2012, construction started on two condominium towers on nearby sites, the rest of the old furniture mart was rented to other tenants, and some nearby buildings went into renovation. Twitter had kissed the neighborhood, which went from being a frog to a prince inside of a few months. The improvements did not please all of the company’s neighbors, 150 of whom took to the streets on the occasion of Twitter’s recent multi-billion-dollar public offering to protest what they considered to be excessive gentrification brought on by Twitter’s arrival, with signs such as R.I.P. AFFORDABLE HOUSING.

Real-estate brokers in Palo Alto and Mountain View needn’t close up shop just yet. The biggest tech employers aren’t going anywhere—they’re too invested in Silicon Valley to leave, and the enormous projects that Apple, Facebook, and Google are undertaking only double-down on their commitment to staying in the Valley. And for all the workers they transport by bus, the companies are doubling-down as well on their commitment to a suburban, automobile-oriented culture. Both Gehry’s building for Facebook and Foster’s glass doughnut for Apple will have parking for thousands of cars. (By contrast, Yahoo, headquartered in Sunnyvale, is opening an urban outpost in the Art Deco San Francisco Chronicle building, in the city’s downtown. The company is tentatively planning 20 parking spaces for cars, and 200 spaces for bikes.) It’s true that in the Gehry and Foster buildings most of the parking will be underground, so it won’t create the same visual blight that acres of asphalt do now on most Silicon Valley campuses. But a car tucked out of sight all day uses the same amount of gas to transport its driver to and from work as the one left in a surface parking lot, and most people will still drive to work. (Twitter says that 57 percent of the 1,500 employees at its San Francisco office live within the city’s seven-mile radius, and that 15 percent come to work often by bicycle.) While it’s also the case that the new Silicon Valley buildings will use less energy, at least per square foot, than older office buildings—the new Apple headquarters will have operable windows, natural ventilation, and fuel-cell technology—a lot of that progress has to be credited to the fact that building codes require everything constructed today to consume less energy than the buildings of the last generation.

In other ways these elegant, alluring new buildings aren’t as different from their ugly and ordinary predecessors as they might at first seem to be. They’re a lot more exciting to look at and they may be pleasanter to work in, but they’re still self-contained, anti-urban objects, auto-dependent and set apart from the world around them. The Apple site, several open acres hidden by trees from its garden-apartment and strip-mall surroundings, really does look exactly like a place where a spaceship might choose to land.

San Jose Gets Jobs’d

Given the amount of love that younger Silicon Valleyites seem now to feel for things urban, it’s curious how indifferent the Silicon Valley culture seems to be about a city that is just beside it, San Jose. Admittedly, San Jose is no San Francisco. It’s a sprawling city of no particular character, and like so many American cities it suffers from a sad lack of energy in its downtown. An austere new City Hall, by Richard Meier, intended to ignite the downtown, merely added a touch of elegant desolation to an otherwise seedy desolation. While Adobe Systems and a handful of smaller companies are in San Jose, most of Silicon Valley ignores the city, and it continues to struggle, despite the presence of several of the most valuable companies in the world in its neighboring suburbs. When you think of the effect Twitter has had on a single neighborhood in San Francisco, it’s hard not to imagine what would have happened if Apple, say, had decided to ask Norman Foster to design a new tower in downtown San Jose instead of its spaceship in Cupertino. Where Apple went, others would have followed.

What’s more likely is that San Jose will remain almost entirely off the Silicon Valley radar, while the rest of the region will change—slowly—for the better. There are now plenty of plans afoot to increase density along El Camino Real and around the region’s train stations. Tim Tosta, a San Francisco land-use and environmental lawyer who represents a number of tech companies and developers, told me he is working with a developer on plans to build housing in Menlo Park which will be marketed to young Facebook workers. The units sound like a larger, California-size version of the “micro apartments” that the Bloomberg administration encouraged in Manhattan: small spaces with even smaller kitchens, lots of tech connections, and generous common space to make up for the lack of private space, more an upscale college dormitory than a conventional apartment unit.

Tosta sees the Valley as having no choice but to become gradually more city-like. For better or worse, though, it is the two most architecturally ambitious projects, Foster’s Apple spaceship and Gehry’s Facebook workroom under a garden, that will define the region’s architecture for the next decade. It’s notable that when Silicon Valley finally felt ready to up the architectural ante it went to two of the most established brand names in the business. While neither building is conservative by any standard, neither Foster nor Gehry represents the kind of commitment to being at the cutting edge that these companies try to maintain on the technology front. It would be intriguing to imagine what architects a generation or two behind Foster, who is 78, and Gehry, who is 84, would have come up with if they had been asked to think about the problem of an office of the future for a company of the future.

That said, any architect is only as good as his client, and an architect’s job, at least in part, is to reflect his client’s wishes. And in this case each building stands as a perfect reflection of its corporate culture. Apple, though a publicly traded corporation, is in all other ways an obsessively private company that is determined to control every last detail of the environment its workers occupy, just as it has designed its retail stores to reflect the same minimalist aesthetic of its products, and of Steve Jobs himself. Foster, a modernist celebrated for the elegance of his buildings’ details and their highly disciplined finesse, was almost too natural a match for Apple. He has referred to Jobs as “a kindred spirit,” and worked closely with him for three years on the project, during which Foster came to admire Jobs hugely. “We tend to be unusual as architects because of our appreciation of the minutiae of industrial design,” Foster said to me. “If that is rare in a design professional, it is unbelievably rare in a client. Steve once said to me, ‘Don’t think of me as a client; think of me as a member of the team.’ ”

The problem is that Foster and Jobs seem almost to have been too much in sync. It was as if Foster, who normally challenges his clients, was unwilling to push Jobs, which may explain why the solution the architect came up with seems less a building than a perfectly designed object, like an iPod. But a building is not an iPod. It needs to house a multitude of functions that have complex and often contradictory requirements, and a perfect geometric shape often ends up being less a well-functioning building than a Procrustean bed. Would the Pyramids, say, have made a good office building? A symbol, yes, but a building, no. And Apple’s spaceship, which is expected to hold 12,000 workers, is just as inflexible. You can’t make it bigger, certainly, if you need to expand. And you can’t really argue that the building will encourage collaboration, since, with its circumference of nearly a mile, even workers on the same floor can be as much as half a mile apart. Because the purity of the shape was valued above all else, the large auditorium that Apple wanted was placed underground in a separate structure—a mini-spaceship beside the mother ship. The gargantuan circular building does leave a lot of open space, which Apple plans to landscape with its characteristic care and precision. With endless vistas of curving glass façades, the headquarters will be exquisite, whether or not it is functional: the largest “machine in a garden” that ever was.

The Gehry-Facebook marriage seems, at first, a little harder to understand. After all, Facebook is a much younger company than Apple, and a vastly more casual one in its operating style. You would not expect it to seek out an 84-year-old architect who is famous for his museums and concert halls and has designed relatively few office buildings of any size. The connection, it turns out, was made by Gehry’s friend Bobby Shriver, who is also a friend of Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer. Shriver knew that Gehry, whose work is scattered all over the world, would welcome a big project closer to home in California, and he thought that Gehry would respond well to Facebook’s casual culture. The question was how Facebook would respond to Gehry.

“They asked me to come up to Menlo Park and I met Mark Zuckerberg and he said, ‘Why would someone of your reputation want to do this?’ ” Gehry told me. “I said to him, ‘What is your dream? What do you want?’ He said his ideal was to have everyone in one big room. I showed him pictures of my office, where everybody is in one big room, a whole acre. If you make a 10-acre room on stilts, you can hide the parking underneath, and people can park right under their offices.”

And that, in a nutshell, is what Gehry did, once Zuckerberg had flown down to have dinner with Gehry at the architect’s famous house in Santa Monica, which sealed the deal. If you see the company’s current offices, in a 20-year-old complex in Menlo Park that Facebook took over a couple of years ago from Sun Microsystems, the choice of Gehry seems as logical as Apple’s choice of Norman Foster. The buildings themselves are so dreary that the place was previously known as “Sun Quentin,” but Facebook transformed it into what may be the most playful headquarters in Silicon Valley, exuberant, funky, and casual in the manner of Google, but not as self-conscious, and punctuated with humor rather than sanctimony. (A sign reading, THE HACKER COMPANY, in bright-red neon, was salvaged from a building in Florida and mounted on the façade of the building where Zuckerberg works, a display of wit and irony that you would be hard-pressed to find at Apple, or almost anywhere else in Silicon Valley.) The old Sun buildings, which once contained rows of identical cubicles, have been converted into an assemblage of big, open workspaces, cafés, meeting and recreation spaces, with exposed ductwork and concrete floors and a deliberately unfinished air. It looks, when you get right down to it, like the sorts of things Gehry himself was designing 20 years ago.

Whether it is possible for a 10-acre room to feel casual remains to be seen. At that scale, it may be overwhelmingly monumental, however much Gehry tries to keep it looking ad hoc and informal. Is it possible for a vast room sandwiched between underground parking and a rooftop garden to feel like something other than a convention center, whoever designs it and whatever gets put into it? It’s far too soon to tell, just as it is impossible to know at this point whether Foster’s spaceship will feel like a piece of elegant architecture or an oppressively unworkable object.

Undoubtedly, both buildings will bring a degree of architectural excitement to Silicon Valley that it has never seen before. But the real question is whether, for all their ambition, they will do much to change the underlying suburban culture. They are both big, private, sealed-off corporate villas that most people will reach by car. At a time when the city, not the suburb, seems to hold the allure for younger workers in the technology industry, how much will Foster’s refined, iPhone-like architecture or Gehry’s lively, garden-topped workspace matter? Twitter’s renovated office space in an old San Francisco neighborhood may, in the end, be the real harbinger of the future.