Bubble Wrap

You always hear about these fantastic places to work in - Google, Apple, Facebook... You don't get much of a portrait of them in their local community. The bubbles they create and the bubbles they live in.

Gawker has an article on the physical area surrounding these magnificent centers of enterprise and innovation. The article is itself quite bland and not particularly interesting and the author seems to have made up his mind before he started his excursion. As one wit pointed out in the comments - 

Next up: Ken Layne Circumnavigates Manhattan by Walking the Length of the FDR, the West Side Highway and Harlem River Drive, Concludes New York City is Horseshit.

I want to make it clear that I believe most of the people that work in these companies are intelligent and very good at what they do. They are thoughtful and I have no doubt that they believe in good things and in improving peoples' lives.

However, they are not architects or social scientists, or urban planners. Take for example the  Googleplex. A remarkably hideous example of corporate suburban sprawl. Here is what the entrance to Googleplex's Building 54 looks like -

Here is a picture of the Palo Alto Whole Foods market, taken from Google Maps. The building was remodeled in the Sixties.

And finally a corporate park completed last year by a small-time developer in Long Island, NY.

Not exactly ground-breaking or radical architecture.

And then there's the Apple 'Spaceship', with a halo effect that, based on the buzz it's generated, has clearly transcended the artist's rendering.

Here's a low-res image of the Indian parliament building, without any halos, that was designed a hundred years ago.

There are some radical notions that Steve Jobs appears to have pioneered, but they seem obsessive rather than interesting -

There is not one piece of straight glass in the building. While overseeing plans for the curved glass, Steve Jobs found the industry standard of 1/8 inch breaks between surfaces to be inappropriate and asked that the gaps in his new headquarters be no greater than 1/32 inch across. 

You can very well argue that these are green buildings with serious technological innovations. But that's a little like saying that the design of the processor and the motherboard requires every computer to be a beige box.

The hype that surrounds these projects is surprisingly similar in tone to the marketing that went into selling the suburbs in the Fifties. Here is one rationale for the Googleplex design, from a Vanity Fair article. David Radcliffe is Google's VP of Real Estate and Workplace.

The layout of bent rectangles, then, emerged out of the company’s insistence on a floor plan that would maximize what Radcliffe called “casual collisions of the work force.” No employee in the 1.1-million-square-foot complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk from any other, according to Radcliffe. “You can’t schedule innovation,” he said. “We want to create opportunities for people to have ideas and be able to turn to others right there and say, ‘What do you think of this?’”

Radcliffe says that "you can't schedule innovation". But that's exactly what they're trying to do. It seems a little naive of Google to think that it has somehow found a social engineering hack that will allow it to harvest the genius of its people and allow them to churn out a never-ending stream of innovation. I also doubt very much that Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were beholden to "casual collisions" and to two-and-a-half minute walks when they created the products that made them famous. 

These are large corporations that have built a mythology around their roots as small, scrappy startups and are trying to maintain the same artisanal quality to attract young, starry-eyed talent. 

What they've built are exclusive malls with free stuff. Presumably this frees their employees from having to deal with the daily challenges of life so they can focus on their professional challenges. Their employees eat, play and work in one remarkable complex. They've exceeded Redbook's wildest dreams. They even have their own exclusive transportation system. 

Then there is the real estate bubble that has been created by these firms and their employees. But it isn't a bubble like the one the Big Bad Banks created. This one uses higher prices to exclude a portion of the community. The feeling in the local community appears to be that even when the local community is  acknowledged, it is with unabashed insensitivity.

It was public anger at this privileged existence that finally led Google to subsidise transportation for the urban poor. it might have been a more meaningful gesture to open up their buses to the less privileged, rather than paying them to go away. 

You could argue that Google at least made a gesture that none of the others did. All these private transportation systems use public roads and public bus stops. Google (and others) have expressed their willingness to pay for their use but blame a local law, Proposition 218, that prevents the government from accepting the money.

Of course this would be a more credible argument if they weren't trying to dodge local and national taxes at the same time.