The Power of the Pragmatic
Introduction to the monograph, Studios Architecture: The Power of the Pragmatic, L’Arca Edizioni, 1999
It is rare to be present when a given place in America becomes the site of spectacular wealth creation. It was San Francisco in the Gold Rush 1850s, Chicago in the late 19th century, Los Angeles in the 1950s. In the 1990s, it has been Silicon Valley, a place that has built in only 40 years a matrix of companies whose combined $450 billion market value dwarfs that of Hollywood and Detroit, according to Business Week.
While microchips shrank, personal computers proliferated, and software got smarter, company after company spread out across the flats at the southern end of the San Francisco peninsula. Studios was there, though it wasn’t a very auspicious place for an architect to be. It seems every one of the firm’s ostensible clients was started in someone’s garage. And as they grew, they wanted to retain the fever of that nothing-to-lose startup era. So they built bigger garages. Architecture seemed all but irrelevant when getting hundreds of thousands of raw square feet ready for occupancy as quickly as possible was for so many companies struggle enough.
But these companies learned that it is hard to keep the daredevil, risk-taking culture alive once thousands and not dozens of employees are bent to the task of finding the Next Big Thing–which, by the way, would have to be rolled out in 18 months. Apple, 3Com, Nortel, Silicon Graphics, Fore Systems--they all found in Studios a team that actually could help them think about space as a strategic resource, something that would help them get the job done better.
This is not what architecture is supposed to be. It is a high art, one intended to help our society reach its highest aspirations. But America has always been impatient with architecture as a civic, monument-building enterprise. Some of the nation’s key architectural contributions have come when architectural ambition has merged with business necessity. Chicago architect Daniel Burnham did not invent the office building or rethink its typology. Instead he reclad the generic urban, multistory industrial loft building in an economically civic-minded expression, dressing it up so that it could take its place within the City Beautiful conception of America’s elite. Burnham poured forth this unchoked and civilized vision for the filthy, chaotic, American city in gorgeously pastel-hued renderings commissioned by cities all over the country.
Henry Ford’s early 20th-century dream of converting raw materials to completed automobiles within a single colossal industrial complex met its match in Albert Kahn, who sculpted the most minimal bits of bolted-steel into light-catching, breeze-inducing, minimalist poems of industrial necessity.
Is it fair to place Studios within this pantheon? The firm certainly deserves to be nominated. Yes, Studios is only one of many architects to have worked in Silicon Valley. But it is only Studios that has pushed computer software and hardware companies to look beyond their tendency to erect generic space. Studios does not just bring design to the unwashed code-writing masses, it delves deep into business culture. This may prove to be the firm’s chief contribution, perhaps redefining what architecture itself is about as it helps companies figure out what their core values are and how something as presumably mute and instrumental as work space can represent and support a business culture.
Studios is not about commercial design alone, and with offices in Washington, London, New York, and Paris outside its home base in San Francisco, neither its outlook nor its client base is confined to Silicon Valley. But it is in the searingly competitive environment of the Valley that companies--reaping, on the one hand, vast benefits in wealth, and on the other assuming empire-toppling risks--may actually realize the much-vaunted “office of the future.”
Studios has grown with its Silicon Valley clients. When the projects were small and cheap, Studios learned to build client trust with pleasing--and in retrospect, obvious--solutions to easily overlooked office problems. At Apple Computer’s 1986 Advanced Computer Technology Center, a lavender-painted cable tray slips above rows of office workstations, curling up at the end and sliding away under the ceiling. Simply putting utilitarian cable trays in a convenient location encouraged software engineers to rewire at will, but also proved esthetically elegant.
The first instinct of the typical high-growth company is to build raw space, as much of it being as unencumbered as possible. The windowless warehouse of cast-on-site, tilted-into-place concrete may be fast and cheap, but it is also the most amenity-free form of quickly tenanted space--the closest thing to a garage. Studios has helped its clients see that people can’t work productively for long in really raw space. People need light, a connection to what’s going on in the rest of the world; they need places to interact and to relax.
Northern Telecom (Nortel), the Canadian telecommunications company, asked Studios to help the R & D and manufacturing sides work more collaboratively together. The architect’s key move was to take three dreary warehouses attached to each other and rip a giant S-shaped corridor out of the middle of them. The corridor creates a generous common “street” where various departments have the opportunity to see what others are doing. The corridor thrusts out of the building envelope in a metal-framed prow. It lets the visitor know where the entrance is, but it also announces that this isn’t the same old anonymous Valley workplace. The architects also dropped a skylit atrium into the middle of the complex to create the equivalent of a town square. Most of the time groups of Nortel staff can assemble for informal meetings simply by pushing tables and chairs together. But, to celebrate a product rollout or to relay important company news, the space can be made into a big auditorium. Though it is constructed of spec-budget miscellaneous metal and drywall, this is a monumentally sculptural space, one of the most satisfying the firm has made. More importantly, the firm created a much richer workplace environment out of highly unpromising raw material.
Many clients finally traded up from concrete walls and ceilings hung with sagging batts of plastic-faced insulation to the speculative-office standard of metal decking, steel columns, and bar joists. Such buildings were still inexpensive but they could be more readily tweaked.
At 3Com’s corporate headquarters, Studios added two buildings to an existing campus of speculative structures. While the design picks up cues from the existing buildings, the architects made architectural events out of entrances, stairs, canopies, a fitness center, and other “public” functions. These spaces duplicate the ballet of the everyday on the streets of a city, where people see and be seen, where they schmooze, where they catch up and learn what everybody else is doing. Of course, such informal interaction is part of the agenda of companies like 3Com, which count on accidental encounters to spark the creative juices that make great things happen.
“We need 150,000 square feet in 12 months,” the fast-growing client might explain. “Oh, and we have no idea who will be in it, or even if we will still need it by then--or if we will need more.” These are not problems amenable to the usual blocking and stacking diagrams drawn by the corporate space planner. For companies riding a wave of heady but treacherous megagrowth, the act of building can uncover deep fissures in company identity and culture. More and more companies find themselves betting very large numbers of people and a great deal of money on unproved ideas--and then doing it again. When the product mix or deployment of resources is radically changed every two years or so, should CEOs not ask themselves what is fundamental about the company they run? To build in a way that not only does not impede perpetual corporate transformation but actually expresses the fundamental values and purpose of the company is a far more daunting task for the architect than detailing an elegant curtain wall or coming up with a drop-dead lobby. It asks the architect to participate in a far deeper dialogue during the design. And the deliverable is not just space but something akin to an armature for change.
The 1994 Shoreline Entry Site for Silicon Graphics signaled the first real departure from the Valley’s reflective-glass anonymity, and led the way to a series of projects that began to architecturally express a sociology of work akin to that of a city. The exterior of the building for the first time became much more sculptural, acting as billboard and recruitment poster. It offers a long, sweeping curve to the freeway, punctuated by an oversize, arching entrance canopy. In plan it almost appears as if the usual large pancake-like floor plate has been pulled apart. At this “fissure,” the firm installed stairs, meeting places, coffee bars and other such collaboration-enhancing amenities. High ceilings and external circulation created a more amenable workplace by making daylight and views part of the everyday experience of the otherwise cubicle-bound.
As Studios’ clients moved to the stage where they were building from scratch half-million-square-foot campuses, the stakes--and the opportunities--rose. Studios describes Silicon Graphics’ North Charleston Campus as a kind of high-tech hilltown. Its ponds, pools, walkways, towers and pavilions shot here and there with second-level futuristic-looking bridges create an unforgettable environmental identity. But there is an agenda behind the eye-catching architectural gestures and the diverse palette of materials. Maintaining loyalty, solidarity, and a focus on corporate goals becomes ever more difficult when companies grow large, especially ones that that must meld engineering, manufacturing, and creative cultures. Individual buildings cluster around a central landscaped courtyard, with entrances, stairs, and other common spaces housed in transparent winglike appendages. Bridges and internal pedestrian spines become an armature to which are attached the deep, amorphous floor plates where both engineering and manufacturing are done. Dining and other common activities take place in separate buildings so that people have opportunities to cross through and use the rich variety of social spaces that have been provided. The prominence of circulation makes the idea of moving from one building to another more important, thereby encouraging curiosity about what is going on outside the workers’ own realm. It was possible to augment the complex with lush courtyards and landscaping because most parking is banished beneath a podium stretching under all the buildings.
While Silicon Valley is not the whole story of Studios, the design-for-perpetual-change ethos that works so well for Bay Area firms increasingly applies to clients ranging from white-shoe law firms to blue-chip corporations. Lawyers at Washington’s Arnold & Porter law firm found themselves increasingly isolated from each other as on-line research usurped the collegial atmosphere of the law library. Inserting a multifloor atrium into the spec-building envelope and creating a “garden room” for after-work socializing were among the ways Studios used architectural means to restore a sense of connection for the firm’s 1,000-plus staff.
AirTouch sought to stay connected to its well-regarded roots as one of the “baby bell” telephone companies while developing the agility to navigate the high-risk shoals of wireless telecommunications. By maintaining easy physical movement from floor-to-floor within its downtown highrise environment, Studios fostered a more entrepreneurial environment. The main reception area, conference rooms, and other commonly used services were located off an elevator-transfer floor. Since everyone has to stop at this floor, Studios exploited the opportunity it presented to create the corporate equivalent of a central square, where everyone could see everyone.
The Discovery Channel in Miami shared the Silicon Valley dilemma of growing very quickly while trying to maintain a reputation for producing high quality programming. Here, the task was a balancing act, since an environment that enables creativity is not necessarily one that is assertively creative looking. The layouts of the work areas are particularly intriguing because they are structured with conventional office furniture and nicely designed plywood storage dividers, but are loose in their casual arrangement. There is plenty of “design” at Discovery, but also plenty of opportunity for people to reinterpret the space in ways that suit what they are doing.
Hanley-Wood, a magazine publisher in Washington, breaks down walls that at other publishers are nearly insurmountable. In order to flexibly restructure operations and spin off new publications (electronic and print), Hanley-Wood blurred the lines between publications and placed key shared resources around a skylit atrium. The company principles also wanted to lower barriers, making themselves more accessible to staff, so exterior offices are more transparent and less private.
There are subtle if not subversive inversions of architectural tradition in what Studios does. Architects often use materials--stone, masonry, wood paneling--to denote hierarchy or to specify difference. In today’s business environment, the awe-inspiring lobby and the hushed, isolated corner office are taboo; the hierarchies are played down. Studios uses spatial drama and architectural materials in a much different way, as signaling the youthful, no-holds-barred nature of the workplace; as a recruitment billboard; even as decoration meant to recognize the unhierarchical nature of the space. In this topsy-turvy work world, the fitness center or coffee bar get the most lavish architectural attention.
Another inversion is to bring the idea of the city inside the building. Today’s freeway-webbed office-park world is an urban environment with almost none of the trappings of a city. Rather than buildings placed on streets providing many opportunities for communal social and economic activity, one finds a great number of parking-swathed individual buildings, none of which has any but the most tenuous relationship with its surroundings. Studios has figured out that there is a rich life that does--or could--take place within this fluorescent-lit, reflective-glass cocoon. So they build internalized equivalents of the city--with streets, avenues, plazas, civic and commercial functions; parks and gardens--within the 60,000 to 100,000 square feet enclosed by the typical spec building. With institutional clients, they have enriched the metaphor, building rotundas linking axial corridor axes at Paris’ Societe Generale, a miniature of Haussmann’s design for the entire city.
The third inversion is impermanence. The lifespan of many of the environments Studios makes can be measured in a handful of years. The idea of a building that might go without significant alteration for 15 years or more is just about unimaginable for some clients. Under such circumstances, permanent materials or “timeless” design has no place. Yet architects are trained to think of what they do as potentially timeless, as superseding style. Studios work could be seen as open-ended rather than timeless, as adaptable and accepting of change. In this they are the heirs of a noble lineage, whether it is in the adaptability of the humble “temporary” buildings at MIT that Whole Earth gadfly Stewart Brand has waxed so eloquently over (in his influential How Buildings Learn) or the esthetic power of the vast industrial sheds Albert Kahn built for the automotive industry in its golden age.
Can architecture of the highest order be made of such ingredients? It’s a question that has often bedeviled American architecture. For to place Studios in the canon of great business architects like Albert Kahn or Daniel Burnham is high praise indeed. But what architecture with a capital A means is not what many business clients today need. Those of us who think architecture is important want it to aspire to something more than the elegant pragmatic solution. It should say something about a place, something about who the users are. It should speak to the future in some perhaps ineffable way. Studios has not had too many opportunities to try out architecture on this level. Clients’ tendency to pigeonhole architects as only good at one thing will make it an uphill climb for the firm to translate its few important institutional projects, such as the Shanghai Opera House and the Rice University Alumni Building into a body of work that has not been made in a corporate pressure cooker.
On the other hand, by being so deeply involved with businesses struggling to manage change, the firm is poised to exploit what may become the key architectural development of our time, that is architecture that can support organizational change on a scale and in a way we cannot yet imagine. Already businesses--from software to advertising to management consulting--are finding that they can’t change quickly enough, that today’s perpetual “re-orgs” don’t take deeply enough or fast enough, that no one yet knows how to implement flexible business structures across large organizations. The received wisdom is that architecture doesn’t have anything to do with this. Studios, if anyone, can prove that it does, which could represent a breakthrough of historic proportions.
It is Studios’ synthetic vision that makes me think they can make whatever leaps they choose. Certainly they are acquainted with what few architectural verities are left in an age that seems to have rather little use for this ancient art. That they can get some urbaneness and some architectural amenity into projects that traditionally have had no architectural nature at all is testimony to the fundamentally humanistic outlook that any architect needs to be great.