The iconic periods of world architecture have long symbolized the culture that created them: the pyramidal power of dynastic Egypt; the spiritually uplifting verticality of Gothic cathedrals, even the crisscrossed, gravity-loaded assembly lines of the Ford Motor Company, evoking a sense of industrial flow.

What kind of structures express a culture of software engineers in cubicles, writing code?

Design historian Barry Katz says the answer, until now, has been uninspiring. The structures that line our freeways have given Silicon Valley the featureless character of a giant computer chip.

But that’s changing, he says. He sat down with us to share some insights, to be published in a future book tentatively entitled “The Architecture of Information: Radical Buildings and Visionary Projects in Silicon Valley.”

Q: Silicon Valley has created world-changing innovation in so many fields. So why are we such an architectural wasteland? 

A: First of all: The speed and the pace of the innovation culture here. New startups need a building, and they need it now. And that’s favored an entrepreneurial approach to architecture; we put things up really quickly. And they tend to be very generic spaces. So as the company grows, it can expand in a kind of a modular way. As it moves out of one space, then a completely different company can move into it.

The second thing is, if you think about the signature periods of world architecture, they have really reflected the activities that go on inside the building. But how do you reflect a bunch of guys sitting under flickering fluorescent lights writing code? And there’s been no obvious answer to that.

Q: Do you think that’s changing?

A: Our signature companies — like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Facebook and Google — have matured to such a point that they can begin to reflect on the kind of spatial environments that are uniquely suited to the character of their company.

And they’ve become very, very wealthy. So they have the resources to make a significant investment in architectural forms that will last literally for decades. It wasn’t easy to build Chartres Cathedral in an agricultural medieval peasant feudal economy. But they did it and we’re all the beneficiaries of it.

Q: Do you believe these new projects are a reflection of both the work inside and the culture outside?

A: Absolutely. There is a long history of corporate founders and CEOs creating monuments to their wealth and power. These new buildings reflect, instead, the changing demands of tech employees and the changing character of the work they are doing.

The previous generation of tech workers was trained in engineering schools and went to work for engineering companies and did engineering and then went home.

This current generation is demanding a more flexible approach to work and one that is much more smoothly integrated into their lives, and vice versa. Architecturally, there is an attempt at softening the distinction between being at work and not being at work. Boundaries are fluid. Landscape creeps inside the compound. There is color and playfulness.  Most important, however, are the architectural interventions designed to promote the types of collaboration upon which multidisciplinary, multifunctional teams depend. 

The tech companies are competing for the best talent. What’s going to make a really top notch beginning engineer or researcher or designer want to work for my company rather that walk across the street, since we’re both giving you starting salaries of $145K?  It has to do with things other than money. It’s quality of life.

STANFORD, CA – OCTOBER 23: Barry Katz, a fellow at the Palo Alto-based design firm IDEO and an adjunct professor of design at Stanford University Department of Mechanical Engineering, is photographed in the reflection of a mirror during an interview with this news organization at Stanford University on Oct. 23, 2019. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

Q: Do you admire the innovation that’s built into these new projects?

A: All of these buildings are intensely technological — tackling structural issues, water issues, seismic issues, ventilation issues, solar energy issues. And while that is a not a distinctively Silicon Valley phenomenon, I think we are pushing that envelope.

Q: Google vs. Apple. Thoughts?

Work continues on Google’s Bay View campus near Moffett Field in Mountain View. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group) 

A: There is a quality to the Apple building that is so focused on the perfection of the building itself and its immediate, natural environment — the hills, the trees, the landscaping. But like your iPhone, iPad and iMac, it is impenetrable and it has, in a sense, turned its back on the surrounding world.

The Google campus wants to be a conduit between city of Mountain View and the natural environment of the Baylands. So there will be pedestrian paths that run straight through the campus. There will be retail, there will be restaurants, there will be cafes that are open to the public, where you don’t need to show your badge.  It’s a radical departure from a conventional corporate campus.  And that in itself is striking, even breathtaking.

It’s a perfect metaphor for the different nature of the companies.

Q: You admire the Apple project for the huge contributions it has made to the fields of architecture, design and construction.

A: Yes – Apple invested heavily in the building and construction industry worldwide in order to make that building happen.

The construction costs for the new Apple Park in Cupertino reached a reported $5 billion. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) 

Apple wanted curved glass panes. Glass contractor Seele said “We can’t do that our autoclaves. They don’t have that capacity.” And now they have that capacity.

Mitsubishi said “We can give you an elevator that will take people from the entry level of the Steve Jobs Theater to underground parking. And Apple said: “Actually, we want it to swivel like a barber’s pole, so you’re facing the direction you need to exit.” Mitsubishi said, “We can’t do that.” And now they can do that.

If you talk to people in almost every industry — certainly in the Bay Area — they’ll tell you that so many companies were touched by the Apple initiative. They have given a gift to these professions.

Q: Facebook’s new Frank Gehry-designed building reportedly has the largest open floor plan in the world. Is it hard to work there?

A: The first time I visited Facebook, I was astounded by the vast galactic interior space — multiple football fields. It’s been compared with an aircraft carrier, with decks and such. It’s just enormous, under this extraordinary nine-acre living roof.

A rendering shows the completed pedestrian/bicycle network, as well as the completed Facebook campus expansion along Chilco Road in Menlo Park. (City of Menlo Park) 

The most recent visit, I noticed that different teams have begun to build little neighborhoods within this enormous city. They had put up foam core boards and cardboard sheeting and asked facilities to create little enclosures.

The limitation of modernism has been that we create a geometrically perfect building. And if it’s exposing your bathroom to the street…well, too bad.

My sense is that the building’s new “micro communities” have spontaneously formed in response to something that’s not happening architecturally.

Q:  What do you love about the new Nvidia campus?

A: CEO Jen-Hsun Huang sat down with Gensler’s principal Hao Ko and said to him: “I want you to find my soul.”

So they designed a building according to the metaphor of the video chips that Nvidia has innovated. The video chip is a triangle… And they responded to that by creating tiny units that are triangular, from conference rooms, to the shape of the building, to the skylights to the three separate buildings that will ultimately make up the entire campus.

That could easily become a kind of a cliche. But it’s integral to the concept of the building. And its execution — I think they just pulled it off really beautifully.

Artist rendering of a building under construction at the NVIDIA campus in Santa Clara, Calif., Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015.  (rendering courtesy of Nvidia) 

Q: OK, lightning round! Any favorite structures?

A: Moffett Field’s wind tunnel. It perfectly expresses what it does. Period.

And SLAC’s Linear Accelerator. It was not designed around the scale of the human body, but the scale of subatomic particles. This resulted in an extraordinary physical form.

Q: Samsung’s new headquarters?

A: I love it because of the research that went into it. It attempts to create visual contact among employees at multiple physical levels of the building. This promotes interaction.

Q: Microsoft?

A: The new campus will be fundamentally about water. All of the water used in that building is going to be recycled with only two exceptions: drinking water and cooking water.

Open spaces and common areas of a proposednew Microsoft campus in Mountain View. 

Q: Salesforce Tower?

A: At present, the scale of the building is completely unreasonable for the city. In the future there will be a cluster of comparably tall buildings around it. That will at least give it a little bit more context.

Q: The Salesforce Transit Center?

A: It broke, but we can fix that. It is an extraordinary technical achievement — weaving a multimodal transit network into the densest part of San Francisco. And it makes all of these moving parts happen simultaneously.

Q: Transamerica Pyramid?

A: I have gone from hating that thing to just loving it. It’s a visual representation of the hierarchical structure of the American corporation. I imagine the CEO at the very top and then vice presidents a few levels down, and then corporate managers below.

And the fact of its distinctness on the San Francisco landscape — as with the Eiffel Tower, which people hated at the time. It has acquired a kind of a beloved iconic status.

Q: With all of our newly minted millionaires and billionaires, are we seeing exciting new residential design?

A: It’s a rather depressing topic for me. The investment in architecture in Silicon Valley has tended to be in the $30 million dollar hilltop residences of the princelings and the royalty of Silicon Valley. And I’ve been actually quite shocked at the lack of architectural imagination that should correspond to those budgets.

Who is Barry Katz:

Job: Adjunct professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University; professor of industrial and interaction design at California College of the Arts; fellow at the Palo Alto design firm IDEO

Age: 69

Birthplace: Chicago

Residence: Palo Alto

Education: McGill University in Montréal, the London School of Economics, University of California at Santa Cruz

Books: Change By Design (Harper Collins, 2009), Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design (MIT Press, 2015) and four others

Five things about Barry Katz:

1.) He wishes he could talk to 1st century B.C. architect Vitruvius. “I’d want to know how he thinks about utility, stability, and beauty in the 21st century.”

2.) If he could live anywhere: “Hill House,” off Skyline Boulevard (San Mateo County). “It’s a curved structure that looks like a Cheshire Cat just grinning out of the hillside. And it’s just perfectly sited.”

3.) He loves Rio de Janeiro because of its physical setting, and Chicago because of its lakefront architecture. But his favorite city is Montreal. Not because of its architecture, but because of its link to a special time in his life.

4.) He’s a long distance runner, training in the hills above Silicon Valley.

5.) His hobby is stamp collecting — specifically, stamps of the Palestine Mandate, 1918 to 1947.