Frank Gehry Is Designing Facebook’s New Office Building And That’s Sad
gizmodo.com.au
gizmodo.com.au
>It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks...
How can people possibly design and implement software under those conditions?
How numb do you have to be to spend 8 hours in these conditions, even doing nothing creative?
I only once worked in an open office space, at BMW and absolutely hated it. They actually realized it was a mistake and introduced closed rooms with hot-desks which they called "thinking cells" (Denkzelle).
I believe the decision for open office space is often an example where the stated and actual goal are far apart. The managers want to save cost and scram more people into a cheap to build room. But they sell it as "creative" or "productive" workplace.
If I _did_ ever have problems with it, there were always small meeting rooms with doors that were empty 90% of the time.
In my 4 months there, I never heard a single complaint about the open space being distracting from any engineer, manager or designer.
I'm not disputing that many people may require absolute silence for productivity or that it may be distracting to work in an open space, but I suspect that it's less common than you might think, or at least less common among the variety of people that Facebook attracts as employees.
Also, I think your suspicions that it was motivated by an effort to save money are rather unfounded. Facebook is not a company to skimp on employee benefits, and I can't imagine they would ever sacrifice per-employee productivity for a cheaper workplace on purpose.
Gehry takes this idea to a whole new level - distinctive at all costs. His work is unpleasant, but people remember it. Thus Gehry becomes "cool". Hey, its a business strategy.
Walt Disney Concert Hall is one of the most stunning buildings on the west coast, inside and out. It's not a gimmick, it's genuine artistic achievement.
For example, the EMP here in Seattle looks pretty weird from the outside. I can see how you'd call it unpleasant/memorable based on pictures or driving by but once you go in it's great. Some beautiful interior spaces, well organized, works well for the purposes I've been there for.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/06/mit_sue...
It's a very cool looking building, but "doesn't leak" still wins for me. Architecture is a demanding discipline in that your work of art also has to be a usable, practical structure. If it isn't, you've failed, IMO.
If you're going for artistic value alone, you should stick to sculpture.
I'll take cool and interesting over the usual banal office-park architecture (aka "mcdonald's architecture") any day one usually sees in SV...
Form should follow function. Especially for something that will last unchanged for decades.
- Tech company employees have a near equal distribution of living in either SF or the south bay, with some folks in the east bay. Having an office in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, or Mountain View is a good compromise on commute time for all of these groups.
- Individual offices require much more space per employee, and isolate people. Facebook has chosen to build offices on open plan, which they see as better for their culture, collaboration, and internal communication.
- Putting an office in a downtown area requires parking, and most of the Bay Area "downtowns" can't cope with 6000+ cars from a single company without major parking expansion.
- Keeping all of this in mind, renting office space in a downtown area would require either purchasing an entire building to fit enough people (if such a building even exists), renovating it, providing parking for 6000+ people, plus all of the other logistical issues that come with working in a downtown area. SF/Bay Area isn't NYC and isn't optimized for non-car commuting.
- Office parks provide many other benefits for companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. They can keep all of their employees (and their NDA-covered communications) absolutely private. They can provide many services at the campus that subtly convince employees to stay at/near the office longer. They can provide large food service areas, keeping employees at the office for lunch/dinner, and keeping their conversations within the businesses walls.
Building out an office park provides easy access to freeways, lots of (free) parking, cheaper utility costs, and easier construction/modification costs. Renovating an office park is going to be less expensive, in general, that completely gutting and renovating a skyscraper.
- At a company the size of Facebook an office park is the only thing that makes sense.
- Tech company employees live in the south bay mostly because that's where the tech companies are, not the other way around.
- Reaching SF from the east bay is much easier than reaching Mountain View/Palo Alto from the east bay; in general SF seems like a better compromise for commute access from the whole region.
- Not requiring parking was kind of the OP's point. Put the office somewhere with actually decent transit access, and build no parking at all.
- Skyscrapers work fine for big finance companies even more paranoid about their secrets than Apple and Facebook.
- Plenty of companies larger, smaller or of comparable size to Facebook find that a skyscraper in a real city makes sense.
I think the real answer to the OP's question is mainly that the extreme power of NIMBYs in California makes it nearly impossible to build new tall buildings, so truly urban office space is in very short supply. Indeed, it can be difficult to build much of anything in California that isn't more or less in the middle of nowhere -- Facebook and Google are both practically in the Bay! The development of SoMa may prove something of an exception to this, and it will be interesting to see if many tech companies move into the new office space planned there.
Locating offices in/near San Jose (limited tower availability due to SJO-induced height restrictions), Oakland/Berkeley, San Francisco, and possibly satellites in Walnut Creek or Pleasanton/San Ramon (many more established companies do have datacenters in these areas) would make more sense.
Why do so many companies locate in/near Palo Alto? VC and founders. Headquarter location is most often dictated by the CEO.
Where's Mark's house again?
I get that some people prefer to work together in a room, constantly interrupting each other. I don't understand why, but I respect their desire to do that, and would say, let them do it.
But the idea that every engineer should be subjected to constant interruptions without the choice to have some personal space to focus on work is asinine.
I worked at Microsoft in the past. Their earliest buildings- from when they first got the chance to build their own office buildings are in the shape of very large Xs. Each of the four wings has a central hallway and then is divided up into rather small offices for one or two people. Everyone has a window out to the trees. Its the perfect programming environment (except for my neighbor who got in the habit of bouncing a racketball against our wall).
For an example of what I'm talking about check out building #1-10 here: http://goo.gl/maps/kQRzp
Your view was predominantly trees too. Later buildings are built like Es and other shapes that have a lot of surface area, though some became more "office like" during the period where they were hiring so many employees that they needed to maximize density rather than productivity. (irony, I know.)
One of the reasons I'm a startup founder rather than an employee was too many employers choosing "collaborative" office plans because they were cheaper.
And for the record, I've found that collaboration works much better when you have a choice about it-- when the serendipitous interactions happen in the break room or somewhere else where you're not trying to focus on a problem.
But hey, these days most of these sites are websites, and don't really have big engineering problems to solve. Maybe they don't need to think deeply.
For instance, compare this office with Apple's new Mothership. The O has a great deal of surface area, and looking out the outer windows you will only see parkland (The parking is underground and the property is bordered with trees.) Even the center area of the O is a park itself, and the O is so huge that it should be a decent view.
This is by far the most presumptuous and arrogant comment I've seen on HN this week.
Disingenuous too. You claim to "respect" people who like working in open office spaces, and then you turn around an insist they are less productive, and indeed, working on easy problems that don't require extensive thought.
Seriously man?
Peopleware covers this in great detail. There is a section which suggests that quiet office space is required to find the best non obvious solutions.
Could be a bit of tongue-in-cheek there.
"Asking Gehry to design their latest building is the classic no-taste-masked-as-taste, socially accepted anti-establishment move."
If they had gotten a drab, soulless building, there'd be complaints they had gone too corporate.
It's clear Facebook is trying to emulate Apple, but somewhere in the process they missed the entire damned point and took the easy way out.