Why Silicon Valley is so bland, my 2¢ on GoPro
I spent last week out in Silicon Valley/SF (partially why this is late!). Working in technology means spending a lot of time going up and down the towns along the 101, even if your home base is New York. I’ve never felt the strong pull of living in the Valley: I grew up in a (differently focused, less ambitious) monoculture of zip-up fleece vests up in Portland. Pragmatically, though, it’s a place unmatched for fluidity of business, the almost overwhelming interconnectedness of technological commerce. Running a tech company necessarily finds you there often.
In contrast to the intellectual atmosphere of intense creative production, the built environment down on the ground in SV is appallingly bland. Sand Hill Road, the home of most major venture capital firms, where tens of billions of dollars are managed, is an office park so understated you could mistake it for an upscale suburban medical office. Corporate campuses of titans don’t stun either: Take a look at famed One Infinite Loop.
Architecture is a human experience pulled together from physical material, much like tech products themselves. I’ve always wondered if all that energy was just used up in the virtual, leaving none for more creative architecture.
Self-promotion
Not at all architecture related, but about an imperiled San Mateo company I admire a lot: GoPro. My thoughts on how they could turn the company around with a focus on software, not increasingly commoditized hardware.

Sim City "Light Commercial" zone, or epicenter of entrepreneurship?
Macro
Why Are America’s Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?
Tracing the history of the pastoral obsession in Valley architecture from the 19th century to today. Labor politics, Central Park architect Olmstead, corporate estate fantasies, etc. (By friend Hunter Oatman-Stanford)
www.collectorsweekly.com • Share
From 1977 UC Berkeley, at the crossroads of compsci and architecture. The authors outline, in succinct, semi-utopian terms, a “language” of components that can be mixed together to create functional cities and communities.
www.patternlanguage.com • Share
Micro
Apple's new campus will be a retrograde cocoon
The Foster spaceship looks great in renderings, but this review from one of my favorite architecture critics shows it for the suburban bunker that it is.
Video: Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council
Aside from seeing Jobs’ oratory skills outside of a keynote, this is fascinating for being probably the breeziest California city planning session ever. “We’ll get right to approving that! Standing ovation! No questions!”
Photos: Facebook's Disneyland-Inspired Campus
Facebook’s campus has a variety of surreal, simulated low-density urban interactions, like a company barber and a company coffee shop. I’d call it more of a New Urbanist hellscape, but I’m not much of a fan of Disneyland. Allison Arieff puts it more articulately: “There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place.”
www.businessinsider.com • Share
Long read
The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley
A contrarian academic read of SV buildings that sees it as an assertive, alternative aesthetic which favors relatively temporary, disruptable physical spaces over grandiose, permanent ones. (Frustratingly only the first page is available for free online. Because, y'know, so much profit to be squeezed from one-off buys of a 16 year-old humanities journal article.)
By Matt Hackett
I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.
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