Buildings, their surroundings, and the street vibe need to be attractive to the no-collar class. The architectural grandeur, spatial configurations, and wealth of amenities of tech campuses such as Apple, Facebook and Google speak to a utopian imaginary and feelings about contemporary working life. The designs of these corporate estates declare that the work that is taking place within their walls is exciting, innovative, cutting-edge, and impactful. It is through these symbolic spatial dimensions that corporations assimilate themselves into and promote the values of an increasingly dominant tech culture.
Often, despite seeking to plan for inclusive design, the spaces surrounding these Silicon Valley wannabees remain eerily silent. When Big Tech establishes urban amenities within its buildings, it removes the buzz from the city streets. Google employees notoriously rarely leave their grounds. Why should they? Google has a gym, a shuttle bus, and even its own chef! Employees are safely cooped up in their offices, while the city struggles to look alive. This also happens when corporations occupy an area or a neighbourhood: the many layers of security and surveillance that are critical for Big Tech work to remove any ‘undesirables’ from the area and ensure surroundings are conflict-free zones for business to proceed as usual. The modern corporation expands in order to enclose.
In this essay, we discuss how the city is transformed, using public funds, to cater to the modern corporation and how the promise is more often than not better than the reality. We focus specifically on Big Tech in two cities that have been reconstructed – Dublin, the capital of Ireland and Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo (KCW) in Canada – both marketed as home-grown versions of ‘Silicon Valley’.
From the symbolic workplace…
‘Be Bold’, Facebook’s career homepage declares, ‘When you’re in charge of making a difference, there is no limit to what you can do’.1 Facebook’s offices also seek to convey this message. Facebook’s newest headquarters in Menlo Park, California is a single 40,319 m2 floor – the world’s largest open-plan floor – to foster the free exchange of ideas. The building, designed by Frank Gehry, features desks with no cubicles or partitions, clustered in specific configurations called ‘neighbourhoods’, which are linked by curving ‘pathways’. The lack of individual offices means that even Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, sits at a simple white desk. Above this inward-facing neighbourhood community is a 36,421 m2 green roof, which provides 804 metres of winding nature pathways, 400 trees, hidden alcoves for private relaxation, and benches for group brainstorming sessions. The connection with nature presents the image of an idyllic environment while also contributing to the possibilities for spontaneous interaction that may ultimately result in bottom-line benefits. New recruits applaud the design as emblematic of Facebook’s focus on fostering an environment that is conducive to collaboration, the free flow of information, and openness and transparency.2 Although seasoned employees eventually become resistant to the Kool-Aid, the allure is sweet enough to encourage new recruits to go through the doors.
While Menlo Park is a suburban idyll, it also houses several inner-city characteristics in the form of urban amenities. Interestingly, this all-in-one urban imaginarium is being replicated by Big Tech irrespective of location. For example, Canada’s Google engineering headquarters in downtown Kitchener, Ontario, started out with 17, 181 m2 of campus-like office space equipped with a cafeteria, multiple cafés (in-between ‘neighbourhoods’), a climbing wall, gym, and a library with a fireplace, armchairs and a secret room. It is a city within a city – a community centre, an office and a home – to keep the workers in situ, within the comfort of their own living room.
The twentieth-century white-collar office and today’s modern ‘coffice’3 version share the impulse to dazzle with design, seeking to symbolise the progressiveness of the professions they house. For the twentieth-century office this was a deliberate separation between factory labour and the rise of the white-collar worker. The office symbolised a break from the strain and tedium of factory work and offered the class-based promise of upward social mobility. For the modern-day co-working, café-like office (hence the ‘coffice’), the promise is a break from a rigid hierarchy, a departure from collared attire towards a no-collared ‘athleisure’ class. It is a celebration of partnerships and collaboration, and intellectual and creative stimulation, in a rapidly digitising world.4 In other words, both iterations are based on grand visions of what the future of work ought to be and look like, and rely heavily on design to get the message across. More specifically, the architecture and symbolism generate excitement about the future as an employee. In the twentieth-century office, the design itself suggests possibility: a mid-level employee is just a promotion away from the glass office. By contrast, the modern office removes the cubicles and that unattainable glass office to present an open-plan floor and a flat hierarchy where there is no need to think about a promotion, because there are no physical barriers to overcome. These iterations show how the corporation has always used space to organise, manage, and control the working class.
All of this is to say that design is strategic and deliberate. To uncover the machinations of a new workplace culture, consider the design of its setting. To understand the modern corporation and its influence, however, we need to go beyond the office and look at the city as a whole. This is because a major difference between the twentieth-century office and the coffice is modern work itself, a growing proportion of which is mobile, flexible and project-based – so-called gig work. Workers themselves need to be mobile, flexible and networked in order to land their next gig.5 They cannot be contained, since they are expected to be ‘temporarily omnipresent’ and able to access their work from anywhere and at any time. As wired mobility becomes more pervasive, the outside of the office becomes just as important to the modern corporation as the inside. Today’s workplace needs to rival any other place in the city with good Wi-Fi. In other words, it brings the city to the worker and, to the delight of corporate management, there will be no need to leave. This is also why today’s corporate aesthetic sprawls across the city as a means to manage the no-collar class.
… To the symbolic city
In 2004, Google’s decision to base its European Middle Eastern and Asian (EMEA) headquarters in Dublin’s city centre proved pivotal for the dockland’s revitalisation. Attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) was never too challenging in Ireland due to a tax-avoidance strategy that allowed multinational corporations a comparatively low corporate tax rate of 12.5%.6 Ericsson and IBM had a presence in Ireland from the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard (HP) arrived in the 1970s, with Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle all arriving in the 1980s. Google’s decision to locate in the docklands surprised the Irish since until then tech companies were building campuses outside the urban core.