

Frank Gehry Is Designing Facebook’s New Office Building And That’s Sad  - eplanit
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/08/frank-gehry-is-designing-facebooks-new-office-building-and-thats-sad/

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mistercow
I don't have any opinion about Gehry designing it, but I do have an opinion
about Facebook's quote:

>It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse.
Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks...

How can people possibly design and implement software under those conditions?

~~~
phleet
I was an intern in the Palo Alto office which was pretty similar to that, and
I never felt distracted by it. With my headphones in, it doesn't really matter
whether I'm in an office or loud open field.

~~~
FrojoS
I listen to a lot of music during my work, many many hours per day. But its
usually optional. Its horrible when you have to wear head phones permanently.
The pressure on the ear alone is something I need a brake from. Also, when
solving a hard problem I need silence and I'm not an exception for sure.

I only once worked in an open office space, at BMW and absolutely hated it.
They actually realized it was a mistake and introduced closed rooms with hot-
desks which they called "thinking cells" (Denkzelle).

I believe the decision for open office space is often an example where the
stated and actual goal are far apart. The managers want to save cost and scram
more people into a cheap to build room. But they sell it as "creative" or
"productive" workplace.

~~~
phleet
Even though it was a completely open space, I never really had problems with
noise being distracting, even without my headphones on.

If I _did_ ever have problems with it, there were always small meeting rooms
with doors that were empty 90% of the time.

In my 4 months there, I never heard a single complaint about the open space
being distracting from any engineer, manager or designer.

I'm not disputing that many people may require absolute silence for
productivity or that it may be distracting to work in an open space, but I
suspect that it's less common than you might think, or at least less common
among the variety of people that Facebook attracts as employees.

Also, I think your suspicions that it was motivated by an effort to save money
are rather unfounded. Facebook is not a company to skimp on employee benefits,
and I can't imagine they would ever sacrifice per-employee productivity for a
cheaper workplace on purpose.

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paulsutter
Gehry is a genius of marketing, not design. Andy Warhol knew the key to fame
was to make your work distinctive and memorable. He did it by incorporating
familiar elements. People feel good when they can recognize something, "Oh,
that must be a Warhol". And that's why Warhol became cool.

Gehry takes this idea to a whole new level - distinctive at all costs. His
work is unpleasant, but people remember it. Thus Gehry becomes "cool". Hey,
its a business strategy.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Gehry, like pretty much all artists, is hit or miss. But his hits are
fantastic.

Walt Disney Concert Hall is one of the most stunning buildings on the west
coast, inside and out. It's not a gimmick, it's genuine artistic achievement.

~~~
marquis
Also the Pritzker pavilion in Chicago. It draws you in and even if you are at
the back of field you feel you are still in the amphitheater.

~~~
rayiner
No to both of those things.

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Turing_Machine
De gustibus. Personally I value "doesn't leak" over "looks cool" when it comes
to buildings...

[http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/06/mit_sue...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/06/mit_sues_gehry_citing_leaks_in_300m_complex/?page=full)

~~~
cschmidt
Have you ever been in the Stata Center? I think it is a really interesting
place. Sure, they had a dispute over some leaks, but that shouldn't overshadow
the building itself.

~~~
Turing_Machine
I've been near it, but haven't been inside.

It's a very cool looking building, but "doesn't leak" still wins for me.
Architecture is a demanding discipline in that your work of art also has to be
a usable, practical structure. If it isn't, you've failed, IMO.

If you're going for artistic value alone, you should stick to sculpture.

~~~
jarek
You do realize Gehry has designed plenty of buildings that _don't_ leak,
right? His track record on leaking water after construction is probably better
than Facebook's track record on leaking personal information after privacy
setting changes.

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rayiner
I love engineering culture, but the one thing that irks me is the positively
bizarre ideas about what qualifies as a proper office. It seems to be either
drab office parks in the suburbs or weird campuses in the suburbs with weird
buildings. What's wrong with renting space in an office tower in an easily
accessible downtown and giving people offices with a door that closes? Is it
really cheaper to get Frank Gehry to design you a warehouse instead?

~~~
flyt
\- Finding space in an urban area of the Bay Area that comfortable can fit
8,000+ people is near impossible

\- Tech company employees have a near equal distribution of living in either
SF or the south bay, with some folks in the east bay. Having an office in
Menlo Park, Palo Alto, or Mountain View is a good compromise on commute time
for all of these groups.

\- Individual offices require much more space per employee, and isolate
people. Facebook has chosen to build offices on open plan, which they see as
better for their culture, collaboration, and internal communication.

\- Putting an office in a downtown area requires parking, and most of the Bay
Area "downtowns" can't cope with 6000+ cars from a single company without
major parking expansion.

\- Keeping all of this in mind, renting office space in a downtown area would
require either purchasing an entire building to fit enough people (if such a
building even exists), renovating it, providing parking for 6000+ people, plus
all of the other logistical issues that come with working in a downtown area.
SF/Bay Area isn't NYC and isn't optimized for non-car commuting.

\- Office parks provide many other benefits for companies like Facebook,
Apple, Google, etc. They can keep all of their employees (and their NDA-
covered communications) absolutely private. They can provide many services at
the campus that subtly convince employees to stay at/near the office longer.
They can provide large food service areas, keeping employees at the office for
lunch/dinner, and keeping their conversations within the businesses walls.

Building out an office park provides easy access to freeways, lots of (free)
parking, cheaper utility costs, and easier construction/modification costs.
Renovating an office park is going to be less expensive, in general, that
completely gutting and renovating a skyscraper.

\- At a company the size of Facebook an office park is the only thing that
makes sense.

~~~
lexande
\- There are certainly high rises in downtown SF that comfortably fit 8000+
people.

\- Tech company employees live in the south bay mostly because that's where
the tech companies are, not the other way around.

\- Reaching SF from the east bay is much easier than reaching Mountain
View/Palo Alto from the east bay; in general SF seems like a better compromise
for commute access from the whole region.

\- Not requiring parking was kind of the OP's point. Put the office somewhere
with actually decent transit access, and build no parking at all.

\- Skyscrapers work fine for big finance companies even more paranoid about
their secrets than Apple and Facebook.

\- Plenty of companies larger, smaller or of comparable size to Facebook find
that a skyscraper in a real city makes sense.

I think the real answer to the OP's question is mainly that the extreme power
of NIMBYs in California makes it nearly impossible to build new tall
buildings, so truly urban office space is in very short supply. Indeed, it can
be difficult to build much of anything in California that isn't more or less
in the middle of nowhere -- Facebook and Google are both practically in the
Bay! The development of SoMa may prove something of an exception to this, and
it will be interesting to see if many tech companies move into the new office
space planned there.

------
champion
Now they'll be as hip as IAC who has 2 buildings designed by Gehry - one in
NYC (<http://www.iachq.com/interactive/content.html>) and West Hollywood on
Sunset.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ask.com, Zwinky, Smiley Central, Popular Screensavers, MyFunCards... but also
vimeo, CollegeHumour, match.com... I hate them yet I like them at the same
time.

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programminggeek
Funny, at least they aren't getting a building that looks like a "like" button
in the same way that Oracle's buildings look like database symbols.

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allard
Would one of the other Pritzker winners fit the company and its functional
needs better?

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tylermenezes
tl;dr "your taste is incorrect"

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nirvana
Zuckerbergs attitude about this makes me think he's a terrible manager and
probably not a very good programmer.

I get that some people prefer to work together in a room, constantly
interrupting each other. I don't understand why, but I respect their desire to
do that, and would say, let them do it.

But the idea that every engineer should be subjected to constant interruptions
without the choice to have some personal space to focus on work is asinine.

I worked at Microsoft in the past. Their earliest buildings- from when they
first got the chance to build their own office buildings are in the shape of
very large Xs. Each of the four wings has a central hallway and then is
divided up into rather small offices for one or two people. Everyone has a
window out to the trees. Its the perfect programming environment (except for
my neighbor who got in the habit of bouncing a racketball against our wall).

For an example of what I'm talking about check out building #1-10 here:
<http://goo.gl/maps/kQRzp>

Your view was predominantly trees too. Later buildings are built like Es and
other shapes that have a lot of surface area, though some became more "office
like" during the period where they were hiring so many employees that they
needed to maximize density rather than productivity. (irony, I know.)

One of the reasons I'm a startup founder rather than an employee was too many
employers choosing "collaborative" office plans because they were cheaper.

And for the record, I've found that collaboration works much better when you
have a choice about it-- when the serendipitous interactions happen in the
break room or somewhere else where you're not trying to focus on a problem.

But hey, these days most of these sites are websites, and don't really have
big engineering problems to solve. Maybe they don't need to think deeply.

For instance, compare this office with Apple's new Mothership. The O has a
great deal of surface area, and looking out the outer windows you will only
see parkland (The parking is underground and the property is bordered with
trees.) Even the center area of the O is a park itself, and the O is so huge
that it should be a decent view.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"But hey, these days most of these sites are websites, and don't really
> have big engineering problems to solve. Maybe they don't need to think
> deeply."_

This is by far the most presumptuous and arrogant comment I've seen on HN this
week.

Disingenuous too. You claim to "respect" people who like working in open
office spaces, and then you turn around an insist they are less productive,
and indeed, working on easy problems that don't require extensive thought.

Seriously man?

~~~
dpritchett
They are less productive than they could be with better office space, not
necessarily less productive than everyone who works in private offices.

 _Peopleware_ covers this in great detail. There is a section which suggests
that quiet office space is required to find the best non obvious solutions.

<http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_12>

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taligent
I don't even know where to begin with this article. It screams of some hipster
annoyance at Facebook (uncool) liking Gehry (cool):

"Asking Gehry to design their latest building is the classic no-taste-masked-
as-taste, socially accepted anti-establishment move."

~~~
philwelch
I don't think it's a hipster comment at all; it's spot on. Gehry doesn't get
these projects because he's such a great architect. He gets them because he's
a brand with a certain reputation, and the OP basically summed up what that
reputation is and what it really means when someone hires Gehry based on that
reputation.

It's clear Facebook is trying to emulate Apple, but somewhere in the process
they missed the entire damned point and took the easy way out.

~~~
jcampbell1
I agree. My guess is Zuckerberg hired Gehry because that was the only
architect whose name he knew. Gehry is very old and his buildings are just
expensive attention whores. I really wish he went with someone younger with
actual talent. Jeanne Gang would have been a good choice.

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drivebyacct2
Two paragraphs in: "Oh, it's Gizmodo. How the hell did I get here?"

