Headline Dec 20, 2015/ IT WILL UNLEASH THE TECHNOLOGIST IN ALL OF YOU : ''' SILICON VALLEY '''

IT WILL UNLEASH THE 

TECHNOLOGIST IN ALL OF YOU : ''' 

SILICON VALLEY '''

THE PROBLEM WAS  -that Foster and Jobs seemed 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 seemed 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 building 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 facades, the headquarters will be exquisite, whether or not its 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, 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 bigger project closer to home in California-

And he thought 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 said  : "What is your dream? What do you want?"

He said his ideal was to have everyone in one big room. I showed him the picture of my office, where everybody is one big room.

If you make  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 in the architect's famous home 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 couple of years ago from Sun Microsystems, the choice of Gehry seems as logical as Apple's choice of Norman Foster,

The building 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.

The Honour and Serving of the  ''Historic Technology Research''  continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing. 

With Respectful dedication to Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!, Larry Page, Google, Dr. Andy Groove Intel, John Chambers Cisco. Paul Allen Microsoft. See Ya all sires on !WOW!  -the World Students Society:

''' Art In Technology '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless