Maria Paez
Supreme (In)formality: The Productive Mastery of Silicon Valley's 'Tech' Corporate Architectures

Abstract

The area we call Silicon Valley has been widely recognized as the fulcrum of a process that through the transformation of post-WWII and Cold War technologies mobilized an electronic revolution that since the late 1960s has shaped our lives worldwide. An achievement attributed in the mainstream to early cooperation between academic research, liberal financing mechanisms and shear entrepreneurial vigour.

However, the thesis supports how this engine of economy gained its strength through a political and social dimension, when in the late 1970s –from within the garages, university lecture rooms and office parks of the cities south of San Francisco Bay– a community of hobbyist and intellectuals, helped by theories that imagined the world as a whole system, namely cybernetics and media theories, hoped to reinvent in the virtual the communities that they had failed to create in the physical world. These early explorations effectively helped to fold countercultural idioms of community, self-realization, and oneness into the fabric of technological innovation, resulting in the highly profitable personal computing and data-driven economies that govern our world today.

The transference, management, and enclosure of the taxpayer-funded technology into highest forms of private technological innovation as a form of labour, paradoxically, was taking place from within unassuming suburban office stock well into the 1990s, when the largest of these corporations first mustered architecture's capacities to consolidate their workforce in spaces designed and built for themselves. Currently, a new wave of this process is taking place, although unlike its predecessors that returned to the established typology of the corporate campus to create expected inward-looking research and development enclaves; the projects emerging today in Silicon Valley, in their desire to distance themselves from preconceived models and create the new, muster in far less contrast a series of spaces and images outside its bounds into the domestic and civic spheres to generate in the physical world what their technologies in the virtual do so well, negotiate enthusiastic consent and capture our creative, intellectual and communicational capacities.

Through the comparison of diverse primary sources of information, drawings, project imagery, public forms of communication, key statements, legal documents, planning and permitting documentation, biographical and journalistic accounts, as well as photographic records and archival information, from the predominant positions of the city, the company, and the architect; the thesis will examine the architectures of three recently built headquarters for Apple, Google and Facebook. These apparatuses provide fertile grounds to assess in which ways forms of power relations are being asserted, and how these spaces are distinctly looking to create and elevate a form of labour extraction – factories without assembly lines– that are perpetuated through its own technological production, rendering invisible the exteriority of life outside of work.

If our natural capacities to coexist as individuals are under siege as a form of production, it may be said that to bring forward its material dimensions is to position architectural form in itself - through its aesthetic, spatial and organizational complexity- as necessarily implying its political dimension.

Thesis Supervisors

Dr Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
Prof. Jeremy Myerson

This Project is sponsored by Haworth