Files on Air
Episode 7: María Páez González, 'A Commanding Type?'

María Páez González:

The earliest recorded use of the conflation of ‘head’ and ‘quarter’ dates back to 1622, when warfare between Catholic and Protestant factions of power had erupted across Europe, and the new term was used to refer to the central military tent or pavilion from which high-ranking officials would design the chaos of frontline conflict into an effective tactical structure for conquest. Soon afterward, in 1645, John Goodwin described Jerusalem as a headquarters in Innocency and Truth Triumphing Together. The city, he believed, operated as a central gathering place for the apostles, from which their ‘spiritual designs’ emerged to shape the diverse practices of Christian ritual into an organised religion. One of the most significant examples of the term’s early spatial dexterity, however, can be found during the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire in the late 18th century. Some military scholars attribute Napoleon’s tactical advantage in mainland Europe to the engineering of his military headquarters, otherwise referred to as his ‘household’, which functioned as a ‘technical apparatus through which the emperor worked’. It could expand or contract based on the changing requirements of different territories and wartime strategies, and was capable of being packed into a carriage as a mobile unit if required. It could also be constituted by a select entourage of advisors and functionaries who would accompany the emperor to instil rapport among wounded troops. It was, in effect, a mechanism that could simultaneously order and represent power.

From the 19th century onwards, though, the notion of the ‘headquarters’ was adopted by the economic market, within which it came to denote the nucleus of management and administration for both social and material production. At this time, and in response to the rapid development of communication technologies, centres of business in Europe and particularly in the United States were being dislocated from sites of industrial extraction and processing. As they moved into the heart of the burgeoning city, an architectural shift thus occurred, and factory offices became office skyscrapers. This transition, though, laid bare a strange contradiction. Early examples of these designs, such as those submitted to the 1922 Chicago Tribute Tower competition, showcased a bold outward expression of form that was coupled with a seemingly adverse necessity for entirely hollowed-out interiors, or what Manfredo Tafuri called a ‘lack of functional requirements’. Freed from the direct actions of production, the architecture of the Tribute’s new headquarters therefore revealed, above all else, that nothing was actually made there. Furthermore, its need for ‘flexibility’ also highlighted an internal crisis of stability. The building could not be resolute and specific. Instead, it had to harbour contingency and change. In orchestrating a reactionary collection of workers, activities, departments, technologies and forms of representation, the 20th-century headquarters had to somehow contain that which was not yet planned, or was yet to become.

As the progressive tertiarisation of the global economy accelerated after the Second World War, headquarters then began to migrate from centres to suburbs worldwide, particularly in the United States. During this period, knowledge production and innovation began to be viewed as value-generating activities, and manufacturing processes were widely moved offshore so that they could be distributed across a growing worldwide logistical network. Operating under the guise of ‘light industrial production’ and as appendices to academic institutions, these new suburban headquarters were therefore essential to facilitating the expansion of what is often now referred to as the military-industrial-academic complex. Located outside of the cities, such buildings typically constituted a series of detached structures that were set back from the street and looked inwards towards a private, often green, central space. A third wave in the architecture of the headquarters can thus be said to have occurred at this point: from office skyscraper to ‘corporate campus’. And it is in the thick of this complex, 21st-century transition in its role and form, as a self-contained enclosure segregated from the city, that we find some of the most paradigmatic and illuminating examples of our time. But in all of its contortions, ‘like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to another’, can the headquarters be said to possess any specific ‘deep structure’? Can it be called a type?

Despite the significant role that headquarters have played in organising historical events and contemporary life, their architecture is surprisingly overlooked. Organisational theory offers some insight as to how their strategic functions are structured and the impact that their placement has on nearby communities and public infrastructures. Yet in architectural scholarship, the limited histories of such buildings can usually only be found in monographs. Even within broader discussions on the design of corporate architecture more generally, there is a notable absence of any detailed analytical or critical typological discussion on the nature and form of the headquarters per se. In an attempt to partially address this gap, we might start by briefly examining a selection of key contemporary (and neighbouring) examples that can be found in three cities that lie to the south of San Francisco, in an area known as Silicon Valley. It is here that some of the most powerful corporations in the world are located: Apple, Google (since 2015, the business has operated under its parent company, Alphabet) and Facebook (rebranded as Meta Platforms in 2021), which are now jointly and commonly referred to as ‘Big Tech’. Given the current political context in the US and its imbrication with Big Tech, these architectures call for urgent consideration.

Despite the morphological distinctions that can be drawn between the three examples examined here, what their comparison can illuminate is the paradoxical condition that is fundamentally embedded within the contemporary architecture of the headquarters, which might be described as its ‘deep structure’. This structure is a marriage of opposites between a certain threshold of spatial contingency, which enables self-definition and collective possibility, and an overarching framework that profits from and thus critically undermines those very possibilities. It is, in essence, the simultaneous presence of formlessness and strict form.

APPLE PARK’S MISSION

Apple Park is a mile-long ring set within 176 acres of parkland designed to resemble a ‘native’ landscape in Cupertino, California. The commission for the building, which functions as Apple’s central office and a cultural centre for employees and visitors alike, was given to Foster + Partners in 2009, and the firm worked in close collaboration with the late Steve Jobs and his key product designer, Jony Ive, to develop it. The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which has showcased the dramatic release of the company’s products since 1983, now takes place at the site, and brings together key users and developers who contribute to applications in Apple’s marketplace, the App Store, to witness the theatrical launch of updates and new products every year. Since its opening in 2018, Apple Park has been extensively featured as a stage for these landmark events and the company’s marketing campaigns more generally. What is perhaps not so apparent in the sleek and sharp imagery that typically accompanies them, however, is the relentless order of the ring.

The typical office floor is designed around a self-contained base module, a spatial device that Jobs coined the ‘pod’ in a knowing nod to Apple’s breakthrough product. The pod’s footprint is generated from two rows of ten private offices, or cells, that face an empty central space for collaboration, often occupied by a large communal standing table. This module is then adapted: two cells make a meeting room, six cells make an open plan office, and so on. The endless radial array of pods at Apple Park dictates not only the composition and overall mass of the structure, but was even designed to engender a specific and continuous rhythm of life and production for employees. Walking around the loop, a pattern emerges: ‘pod for office work, pod for teamwork, pod for socialising, like a piano roll playing a Philip Glass composition’. Although this might sound like a variant of the typical open plan (a cubicle-led office landscape that has dominated the history of corporate architecture in Silicon Valley since the 1970s), the pod here is something else entirely. Apple’s headquarters could perhaps best be described as a four-storey building, each floor of which is made up of 320 pods. Its width, as well as its overall size, is governed by a relentless rule that governs everything from building mass to individual body; from park to desk.

Through this lens, a distinct genealogy emerges within which Apple Park can be understood as an intensification of a specific form of life and settlement that is perhaps most clearly identifiable in the architecture of the monastery. Within this typological framework, solitary and collective forms of life coexist, and are epitomised by two core organisational components: the ‘cell’ and the ‘courtyard’. In northern California, the origins of this spatial model can be traced to the Franciscan missions that were used by the dwindling Spanish empire at the end of the 18th century to systematically occupy and secure the coastline from modern-day San Diego to Sonoma. Tellingly, private offices at Apple Park are called ‘cells’, and the shared team areas, although they are placed within the interior space of the office floor, could just as easily be referred to as ‘courtyards’. This nomenclature not only serves the purpose of reinforcing Apple’s trademark on individuality and privacy, but also indicates each unit’s underlying subordination to a larger order. Cells never exist in isolation; they are always brought together in groups that respond to the logic and requirements of a greater whole. As Walter Horn reminds us, the duality between the solitary dwellings and collective walled enclosures of the monastery not only signifies both institutional seclusion and security through the organisation of its architecture, but also provides the spatial basis upon which an individual’s determination to live and practise as part of a collective whole is projected.

This paradoxical marriage of seclusion and inclusion established at Apple Park could perhaps be considered its greatest achievement as a 21st-century headquarters. Inherent within the spatial dialectic that it establishes is the incredible social and economic potential afforded to the ‘self-determined’ or apparently liberated individual who chooses to pursue their own creative success within a precisely constrained spatial, social and economic regime. What is interesting, however, is that for all of the building’s technical novelty and innovation, the central idea that underpins it is, in fact, anything but new. Though it borrows from the syntax of the monastery, it is perhaps more accurately a mission, and thus borrows its form from an architectural type that has historically been fundamental to the mechanics of settler evangelism and colonialism. Since its usage lapsed in such contexts, however, it has merely been reincarnated time and again during the advanced phases of global capitalism as an imagined sense of individual and communal self-determination is staged within a strictly deterministic architecture.

GOOGLE’S BOOMTOWN

In 2015, Google embarked on a highly publicised initiative to reconsider and expand its headquarters. At the time, the company had been occupying and reconfiguring a campus in Mountain View, California, that it had bought in 2005 and which was jokingly referred to as the Googleplex by early employees. The project was initiated amid a rare and significant public regeneration programme in the area that sought to stimulate private property development and economic production by relaxing restrictions on viable plots of industrial land once occupied by a previous generation of tech manufacturers. This period, however, was also marked by a crisis at the company that had catalysed a deep organisational restructuring process. As a result of a raft of simultaneous antitrust investigations, Google was broken up into a range of subsidiaries that represented different letters (‘D’ for DeepMind, ‘N’ for Nest and so on) to be managed by a new parent company called Alphabet. Following an invited design competition, Bjarke Ingels Group and Thomas Heatherwick Studio were chosen to work closely with these various entities in order to develop an architectural and physical object that was both scalable and reproducible, much like Google’s digital products. The collaboration led to the realisation of two major projects: Bay View and Gradient Canopy (formerly Charleston East), which now serves as Alphabet’s headquarters and houses its top officials, as well as some of its most secretive projects.

The prototypical spatial model that underpins these buildings is comprised of two primary components. First is the tent-like roof structure that simulates the behaviour of a lightweight canvas stretched over an array of vertical posts. In the case of Gradient Canopy, this cover encloses more than 30,000 square meters of floor space: approximately four American football pitches’ worth. The second key element is the office interior, which is designed to operate as a furniture-like, reconfigurable platform. Although in theory any spatial configuration could have been composed within such a large, covered space, what materialised at Gradient Canopy was an overlapping of two drastically opposed conceptions of built form that spatialise a strict division between productive labour on the one hand and reproductive labour on the other.

On the first floor, directly under the roof, is a sequence of stepped platforms that rise gently towards the centre of the structure. The figure of the courtyard is again visible, but unlike at Apple Park its function here is broader. Rather than operating as shared spaces for localised teams to gather in, the courtyards act more like public plazas that punctuate the plan and provide access to the lower levels of the building. In so doing, they divide the volume into different ‘districts’ and ‘neighbourhoods’, and an urban hierarchy emerges that engenders a sense of orientation and order for the 3,000 employees who work there, for whom the monumental scale and utilitarian appearance of the space might have otherwise proved overwhelming or even oppressive. Additionally, while there is no apparent predetermination of use that constrains the occupation of Gradient Canopy’s first floor platforms, they are nonetheless defined by a specific substructure of their own: a grid of black lines on the carpet that splits them into 15-square-foot modules, each large enough to accommodate the desks of four ‘Googlers’. Along with the courtyards, or plazas, this grid territorialises the primary interior of the building by portioning it up into what the company’s own architecture and design team refer to as ‘parcels’ of ‘team real estate’. Within their own ‘private’ plots, employees are incentivised to customise and even build their own workstations, making work look and feel something much more like the actions of child’s play.

This infantilising, playground-like atmosphere of the primary office floor, however, is vehemently counteracted by the strict articulation of the spaces at ground level and in the basement of the building. Here tightly organised, specific rooms structure activities, machines and workers (often members of staff who come from further afield, and start their days earlier and finish later than other company employees) that support the work being conducted above through the provision of fresh air, farm-to-table meals, entertainment and even emotional support. Where the first floor is perhaps most redolent of a playground, the spaces that lie beneath it recall a something altogether different: a California boomtown. The boomtowns that emerged during the Gold Rush and the construction of large infrastructure projects like the First Transcontinental Railroad spatialised the pursuit of profit through the efficient deployment of productive labour. Tools, provisions, clothes, entertainment and companionship could all be bought and sold, and spaces for production and exchange were essential to their general organisation. Labourers were relieved of the burden of basic reproductive work, which was in turn displaced, commodified and separated from daily life in order to allow them to focus on a specifically extractive form of production.

At Gradient Canopy, this same division between productive and reproductive labour is evident. A floating platform, which acts as playground for innovation, is serviced by a strictly managed reproductive machine. Feminist scholars have long pointed out that this kind of care and sustenance, seemingly ‘outside’ of production, is of course constitutive and critical to the support and facilitation of productive labour. The vertical division of the two areas of Alphabet’s building, however, engenders a hierarchy of order and relational significance that is reflected in the very products and services that the corporation develops and sells. Freedom on its platforms, both virtual and physical, is moderated and structured; behind small portions of customised artifice and comfort, a precise, profit-focused, hierarchical and deterministic architecture is revealed.

META’S STUDIO

When Facebook’s former campus at 1 Hacker Way reached capacity in 2011, the company announced to the city of Menlo Park that it would begin the construction of a new headquarters that could accommodate its expanding workforce. Named MPK20, in an extension of a codified nomenclature reflective of the sheer quantity of buildings that the company had acquired in the area over time, the new building was the result of neither a commission nor a competition. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was interested primarily in infrastructure, rather than architecture, and ‘barely knew of Frank [Gehry] at all before he hired him to design a new headquarters for his company in Menlo Park’. In fact, Gehry wasn’t even asked about it; it was he who made the first approach with an idea for the design. In his most recent biography, Gehry describes the moment that he thought won him the job: ‘What is your dream? What do you want?’, he asked Zuckerberg, who responded that his ideal ‘would be one big room…[so] I showed him pictures of my office.’ After a visit to that office and a dinner at the Gehry’s afterwards (along with assurances that the project could be delivered on time and on budget), the wheels for ‘something like what Frank had but bigger’ were set in motion.

The Gehry Partners office is a top-lit, mid-century box, 25 feet high and 275 feet long, located in the Westside area of Los Angeles to the south of Venice Beach. Formerly a wig factory and then a car dealership, the ‘light-industrial’ container had been refurbished by the architect in 2002 and subdivided internally as a means by which to generate rental income. While the shell of the building has remained almost intact, the current ‘office’ within, however, has no clear form: when business is up, desks packed with architects and technicians line the space in tight rows. When business is down, models are retrieved from storage to fill the otherwise empty space. This characteristic thriftiness has shaped the culture of the studio from the outset; although outwardly the space appears to brim with creativity and suggests an openness of organisational structure, the activities that it sustains are actually determined by a strict hierarchical order that is led and controlled by Gehry even today, and is subject to the economic performance of the company at large. The office thus embodies what Gilles Deleuze would characterise as a dynamic of ‘modulating intensities’ within which an amalgam of people, desks and objects stabilise and shift according to the necessities of production at a given time.

A wide-angle photograph of the Gehry Partners studio was the only publicly available image produced to visualise the architectural intent of MPK20. Facebook’s headquarters, however, attempts to replicate the effect of the small office at an entirely different scale. The building, although identical in section to its precursor, measures more than 300 feet wide at its broadest point and nearly 1600 feet in length; it is in effect an Empire State Building lying on its side, reorganised as a kind of industrial hackerspace. Gregarious groups of individuals coalesce around different technical skills and knowledge-sharing activities, fuelled by competitiveness and zeal, and areas of the plan are occupied through informal arrangements that most closely resemble squatting. Here the cacophony of colour, balloons, posters, sculptures and graffiti results not from the engaged constitution of a community made of ‘differences’, though. The anti-corporate appearance of MPK20 is not emergent, but precisely designed through the strategic deployment of a distinctly utilitarian material palette (plywood panelling, exposed plasterboard, corrugated steel and chain link fencing resist association with the slick sterility of the typical office interior) and corporate initiatives such as the ‘Artist in Residence’ that are now common to corporate culture worldwide.

Architecturally, the perception that MPK20 is a collectively designed, ‘bottom-up’ architecture and community is reinforced by the building’s exposed steel structural frame, which is rigged with an assortment of equipment including sensors, speakers and microphones, but also supports the distribution of a peculiar servicing strategy that forces data cabling and electric wiring to precariously dangle from two stories above desk-height. This pull-apart aesthetic of visual incompleteness animates both visitors and staff with a sense of creativity and potential. It is as if ‘anyone could stand up and give a speech at any given moment’. The possibility of self-expression in a dynamic environment of this nature is, of course, not only a formal expression of Facebook’s headquarters. It is also a structural pillar of the company’s social media market dominance and seemingly endless growth. In Zuckerberg’s own words, MPK20 was designed to create ‘the same sense of community and connection among our teams that we try to enable with our services across the world’. This sense of co-creation and imagination, however, is both tightly controlled and highly deterministic, and forged by incentivising continuous engagement in order to perpetually raise the economic bottom line.

What is often overlooked in other readings of MPK20 is how the vast openness of its interior space was quickly perceived by workers to be disorienting and overwhelming upon completion. For its expansion project, MPK21, which was finished in 2018, the general concept of the building was therefore rethought to ensure that productivity would not suffer. The plan was organised around a central open space or courtyard, referred to interchangeably as the ‘sunken garden,’ ‘town square’ or ‘Mark’s redwood grove’. As at Apple Park and Gradient Canopy, this clear spatial figure introduced a sense of order and directionality to the overall plan. Restaurants, public areas and IT services wrap around the void and clearly separate reproductive and productive zones of labour in a bid to enhance focus. And so, the duality of headquarters since time immemorial is thus rendered visible: individual and communal self-determination are essential, but must be restrained by institutional hierarchies and metrics of productivity that require the strictest forms of command.