Few companies have been able to announce a new office as messianically as Google did last February. On the other hand, few companies have ever built offices of this type.
“Google's presence in Mountain View is just so strong that it can't be a fortress shutting out… neighbors. This really should be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” says lead architect Bjarke Ingels of Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in the introductory video. The camera pans high above the heavenly mountain views of the San Francisco Bay Area. He pulls back to reveal a proposed new Google office: an area nestled under glittering glass domes.
On about 3.5 million square feet of commercial land, Google intended to build a campus office that could best be described as a new part of town. Under glass canopies, the thriving neighborhood houses shops, bike paths and modular office space. By building this new neighborhood, Google hoped to expand its workspace, while at the same time accommodating the population of Mountain View, who tend to view them as a "fortress". According to The New York Times, the utopian campus was meant to allay fears that a dramatic increase in Google's workforce would create a Google voting bloc. Such concerns are understandable. As of 2013, the company employed approximately 10 percent of Mountain View's workforce and owned about the same share of taxable property. Despite promises that the campus would be open to everyone, in May 2015 the Mountain View City Council denied Google most of the land they requested. Later that month, Google unveiled a similar but smaller plan to the city. This one proposes purifying our own water supply and expanding the range of amenities that, oddly enough, have allowed at least a few Google employees to move away from private housing - sometimes they sleep in trucks and vans, but otherwise live on campus.
“We blur the outside world and the inside world,” explains Thomas Heatherwick, a London-based designer who is another project lead, in the Mountain View video. He cites the "historical urban model for creating streets" as an inspiration for Google. As The New Yorker writer Nathan Heller puts it, "Inside it's about making Google not just a lifestyle, but a fulfilling life."
This is the life that many want. Google boasts over 2 million job seekers a year. The national media called the office's plans a "glass utopia". There are many articles for business people on how to make your office more like a Google workspace. A 2015 CNNMoney survey of business school students around the world found Google to be their most desirable employer. Its campus is a cultural symbol of this desirability.
The specifics of Google's proposed Mountain View office are unprecedented, but the scale of the campus is part of a new trend in the tech world. Next door to Google is Facebook's newly opened office on their campus, which, as the largest open office in the world, matches the platform's massive online community. Both offices seem modest compared to the ambitious and fraught efforts of Tony Shay, CEO of online fashion retailer Zappos, to revitalize downtown Las Vegas around the Zappos office in the old City Hall.
Such offices symbolize in the public mind not only the future of work, but also a new utopian era with aspirations beyond the workplace. A dream is a place that is both comfortable and entrepreneurial, where personal growth coincides with profit growth, and work is like a game.
Yet while these tech campuses seem unprecedented, they echo the movements of the past. In an age of civil wariness and economic instability, the "total" office heralds the rise of a new technocracy. At a time when terrorism from abroad terrifies us, this carefully planned workplace has its roots in the isolationist values of the academic city and even in the social planning of the corporate city. As physical offices, they are exceptional places to work, but while we increasingly support these places as utopian models for the community, we make dubious assumptions about the best version of our shared lives and values.
Just as Google sought to build a new neighborhood in Mountain View, Thomas Jefferson set out in 1819 to turn the University of Virginia campus into an "academic village." Famed architect Le Corbusier once described an American college campus as "a world unto itself," and it is these enclosed worlds that gave rise to our technological ideals. Tony Shay of Zappos had a wealth of experience in the dorm cafeteria at Harvard College's Quincy House; David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) will make you believe that Mark Zuckerberg's $12.47 billion empire in 2014 alone is still
its essence is a vengeful hostel.
“Of course, tech campuses — not only in layout but also in pace of work — should be reminiscent of student life,” said Nikhil Saval, author of Cubed (2014), a history of the office. "The fact that you have to work long hours, but those hours are punctuated by hours of rest, boredom - you know, you can take naps."
Tech campuses and college campuses seem to be ideologically aligned. Once upon a time, these college campuses had the same impact on the American mind that our technology campuses do now. According to architectural historian Paul W. Turner's Campus: An American Planning Tradition (1984), the US college campus was "an experiment in urbanism"—a more open extension of European universities such as Oxford, whose individual residential colleges originated in the 13th century and rose to prominence in the 15th century as a means of organizing the college experience, keeping the townspeople out, and controlling students prone to fornication. These urban experiments became the vision of an American utopia. Campuses are different worlds; places that appeal to the entire student to educate the student as a whole. The early college campuses were one of the first major architectural projects of the new world and reflected US values and aspirations. They were the first of our hill towns.
A campus culture that seems to serve, shape, and hire all workers has resulted in a boom in positive psychology.
Increasingly, tech campuses have taken on this role.
These offices are considered utopian in part because "they are more thoughtful than most American offices," Saval explained. "The reason they're more thoughtful is that these companies are in some way obligated to take care of it, which other American corporations in other industries don't."
This is because workers with technical skills are in demand. As representatives of the leading cultural and economic paradigm, they enjoy a kind of economic security that is currently lacking in many other areas. Thus, their offices rarely meet their needs. As architecture critic Alexandra Lange points out in Dot-com City (2012), these places keep the outside world at bay—often at the expense of the local economy—to keep employees on campus longer.
Ultimately, school campuses strive to build well-informed citizens. On corporate campuses, employees remain employees. But in both environments, people are encouraged to give their all to work. Thus, a campus culture that seeks to serve, shape, and hire all workers has resulted in a boom in positive psychology—management principles centered on things like mindfulness, perceived autonomy, and feeling part of something bigger than yourself.
“The resources that managers and businesses are trying to extract from workers are in some ways very individual to the worker,” explained William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry (2015) and Senior Lecturer in Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. "Their imagination, their dynamism, their energy level, all that."
However, Davis is skeptical about this approach. “The idea that you can target emotion with a brand, or for that matter with a specific management strategy, is… a kind of behavioral fantasy,” he notes.
This is one way to explain the drama of Zappos, which started as an online shoe retailer in 1999. The current CEO, Xie, has been a student of utopian communities since his first warehouse rave, a significant experience of which is chronicled in his autobiography Delivering Happiness. (2010):
The whole room was like one massive, united tribe of thousands of people, and the DJ was the tribal leader of the group… It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness.
This understanding has merged with the growing new field of positive psychology, which, according to Hsih, confirmed "that the combination of physical synchrony with other people ... leads to a greater sense of happiness." In his book, he outlined his vision for "a path to profit, passion, and purpose." He soon founded a happiness consulting company called Happiness Delivery, which offered coaching and lectures led by VHPs (Very Happy Persons), as well as a Happy Business Index survey to help companies optimize employee happiness.
At Zappos, this too was a mission based on core values such as "Deliver WOW through a service" and "Create fun and some weirdness." And on a 60-acre parcel of land in downtown Las Vegas, just off the Strip in Paradise, Nevada, it has become the guiding light of a new type of city—an alchemical attempt to revitalize the jam-packed downtown of Vegas by turning it into a utopian startup.
They are
play the ukulele and hope to create a "pandemic of smiles" in the city.
The Downtown Project is a startup sandbox, an umbrella organization that funds, supports, owns, and co-owns nearly 300 businesses that employ over 900 people, according to their website. While not technically a Zappos campus, Zappos is at the center of the action in the old town hall. According to a special report by Nellie Bowles for the Re/code website, the Downtown project teaches children the skills they need to start life. The Downtown Project-funded hospitality and safety service called "Rangers" intends to someday track the interactions between workers in search of a cherished encounter that creates innovation. According to Joe Schonman of Las Vegas Weekly, Hey, play the ukulele and hope to create a "pandemic of smiles" in the city.
“The emphasis [of these offices] is on gentle enforcement of people interacting with each other in a planned way,” Saval said. “This is what the original Google campus is. The Downtown project just scaled it down to the neighborhood level."
However, for all the positivity of the Downtown project, the surrounding casinos have sadly become a fitting landscape. The combination of the "Project" of high-stress entrepreneurship, a superficial focus on positivity, and an isolated attendant in an office away from some employees' homes was a gamble, and home often seemed set against them. Since 2013, the Project has witnessed major layoffs, a series of suicides and a loss of faith among many, which has served as a cautionary tale.
Something went wrong? Shay seems to think he hasn't gone far enough. “Studies show that every time a city doubles in size, innovation or productivity per inhabitant increases by 15 percent. But as companies get bigger, innovation or productivity per worker usually goes down. So we're trying to figure out how to make Zappos more like a city and less like a bureaucratic corporation."
The momentum Xie has a historical precedent. In the past, single-industry towns led a life in accordance not only with profit, but also with a certain system of values and a model of corporate control. In the early to mid-19th century, Lowell Mills, Massachusetts, could both enjoy a sophisticated intellectual community and be fired for drinking or taking dance classes, notes Hardy Greene, former associate editor of BusinessWeek, in his book The Company Town. (2010 ). Later, cities like Hershey, Pennsylvania, built by chocolate connoisseur Milton S. Hershey, combined some of the best living conditions of the early 20th century—an orphan school, electricity, a free zoo—with the dangerous absence of an elected government. and a chance to make Hershey himself his mayor. Like other similar cities, Hershey had a "vice police" who enforced cleanliness, flagging houses that were not kept in order and alcoholic employees.
The risk of a corporate city, of course, lies in the district's dependence on the initiating corporation—one of the reasons Mountain View turned down Google's offer. In part, the corporate city was an attempt to remake the world in the image of the industrialist, and often arose from secessionist motives. No one embodied the dynamics of that place better than Henry Ford, the epitome of American technology and entrepreneurship. Ford may have created the modern world with the Model T, but he created many smaller worlds with his model cities. In the 1920s, according to historian Greg Grandin, Ford even proposed a ribbon-shaped city in Muscle Shoals, Alabama that would be five and a half times the length of Manhattan. There he sought to create a culture of "mechanic farmers"—industrial workers who spent their summers working the land—which Ford,
It wasn't until years later and miles away that he achieved massive success. In 1927, on about 2.5 million acres of land granted by the State of Para in Brazil, Ford began building a rubber plantation. It was a new city on the fresh breast of the green Amazon: Fordland. In his detailed 2009 account of Fordland's slow rise from conquered jungle to a city with a main street, a bakery, and a perfume shop, Grandin highlights how the project's economic and organizational obstacles have made it less of a business proposition and more of an ideological battlefield for Ford's vision. American life against the primeval jungle. In 1941, Walt Disney visited the city of Ford, and in 1955, at the age of 53, he founded Disneyland. Half a century later, Disney designers visited Facebook to consult on the design of the company's campus, a new world giving birth to a small world,
A month after Google's announcement, Facebook unveiled a 430,000-square-foot open office space that Zuckerberg called "the largest open-plan
in the world"; Wired called it a "garden roof fantasy land". Vending machines distribute technical equipment, such as keyboards, free of charge to their employees. Nearby, on the old campus, on the main street, decorated in the style of Disneyland, there are many high-quality restaurants, all of which are free. This office is also a vision for how we should work today, from a company that, like Google, is committed to offering more employee housing — an ambition that prompted journalist and academic Tim De Chant, who wrote in Wired, to call on robber barons and city-companies equally. The wide open spaces of Facebook fit well with the widely held view of the innovative value of spontaneous meetings. On its roof, in the nine-acre Facebook Garden with over 400 trees, these meetings take place in nature. In the print shop on the main street of the campus, there is a poster that reads: “Is this a technology company?”
This is a fair question. As the influence of these offices grows both physically in their local communities and ideologically in the working culture of the US, they influence the idea of community in ways that are not always visible.
There is something symbolic about tech companies moving into old government buildings.
“Cities were already turning into giant offices in front of everyone because people were working in all sorts of places — working in coffee shops, working in co-working spaces — an office is basically just your laptop and your phone,” Saval said. “It became clear to the office designers that this process needed to be planned or scaled up.”
But if these companies form the ideal of how our common life should work, then their ideologies should be seen as something more than office politics. Near the High Line in Manhattan's Chelsea borough, you can see the New York office of Google. The white Google logo stands out against the gray facade of the building. But right below the logo etched into the front of the building, its old name is still visible: Port Authority of New York Inland Terminal One.
Google isn't the only company in this building, but there's something terrible about tech companies moving into old government buildings. To some extent, this echoes what is happening in the culture as a whole. Government gets bored easily (try Google “2016 Republican candidates”), and the best and biggest tech companies offer powerful technologies with powerful, often democratizing applications across a wide range of fields. But we must recognize that by making widespread use of these technologies, and by seeing the offices that produce them as a vision for the future, we are delegating some of the control of our shared lives to the platforms, structures, and values they provide.
Like their offices, these companies' products pose serious problems for government and the law: how Facebook's influence on voting could lead to what Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain calls a sort of "digital fraud." If self-driving cars become widespread, would it be illegal for human drivers, with their potential human errors, to endanger everyone else on the roads? Companies like Google and Facebook have moved the world forward with their innovative products. As well as philanthropy and investment in endeavors such as Civic Hall, Facebook and Google are consciously participating in the public realm. But the offices and communities they build are something old—a strong, time-worn urge to get away from the inefficiencies and frictions of living together. They represent the privatization of the community and the seductive desire to solve human problems by reducing their promiscuous human elements. You can only charge for delivering happiness if you can measure it.
In February 2014, in the midst of turbulence and layoffs, the Downtown project changed its motto, which had long been called the "3 C's: Collision, Community, and Collaborative Learning." Xie changed the word "community" to "connectedness". In a 2015 interview with the Las Vegas Sun, he explained the timing of the trials: "Some people started expecting certain things from us, which would be, perhaps, expectations of what the government should do." For better or worse, such expectations arise as companies build urban campuses and adopt the rhetoric of the corporate city.
Often the problems that communities face are intricate, personal problems that do not lend themselves to effective solutions or public models that value non-conflict or corporate control. However, it is not so crazy to dream of a society in which innovation constantly improves civic life; where a more efficient government can provide some security to those who take risks, of any age; where the humanistic aspiration is a valuable guide, and not just
content for the new platform. A true utopia is one that embraces the innovation of creative companies like Google without abandoning everything that came before or assuming that the new is necessarily better.
And a utopia must be a place large enough to accommodate everyone still outside the walls and all the cities they come from.