Tech Giants Hire Star Architects to Build Their Headquarters. What Do They Want Besides Vanity?

For companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Samsung, architecture is an essential part of the corporate image — but these buildings are no longer just "a landmark."

Eric Philips is the Asia partner at the architecture firm NBBJ, and he still remembers clearly that until a little over three years ago, every tech company NBBJ met in China carried the same anxiety. "They wanted to know what was in Amazon's newest office. They noticed that Google had moved foosball tables onto the work floor — the roving food carts, the coffee bars. They tracked every small move their American peers made inside their own offices, and some of them wanted to ship the whole thing over as-is."

Others admitted they were lost: "I'm not sure what I want either. Maybe it's just that atmosphere. Why don't you show me some examples first — when we hit the right one, I'll tell you."

Today, shown the beanbags and ping-pong tables in a designer's reference images, NBBJ's Chinese clients ask a different question: "What does this mean for me?"

Back in 2012, NBBJ designed the Alipay headquarters for Alibaba, a zigzag of office space with more than 80,000 square meters above ground, due for completion this June. Some have joked that from the air the building looks like a giant "ORZ" — the internet pictogram for kneeling, in either worship or despair.

Philips explains the thinking behind it: "Just as Alipay has built a powerful urban commercial center in the virtual world, we wanted the building to embody that free flow of money and goods — a series of connection points that mimic the nodes of an internet transaction, or the flow of a main street in a busy commercial district."

NBBJ was founded in the United States in 1943 and entered China in the 1990s through the renovation of the Beijing Hotel. One of its specialties is office space for large tech companies — Google, Amazon, Samsung, Tencent, Alibaba. It also takes on public projects, mostly hospitals.

On March 20, 2017, the firm unveiled its design for Alibaba's new headquarters campus. It sits in Phase IV of the Xixi campus in Hangzhou, covers 180,000 square meters, and is due to be finished in 2019.

NBBJ is not the only firm Alibaba has hired to build with. The Australian practice Hassell designed another Alibaba headquarters across town in the Binjiang district, and Phase I of Xixi is "Taobao City," by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, whose cluster of office buildings wraps around a single expanse of wetland.

What distinguishes the new project is how it pulls people closer to nature: NBBJ works with relatively dispersed patches of greenery across the adjacent plots, and arranges the offices around several internal courtyards. Every desk is within a one-minute walk of the outdoors.

"We believe that being closer to nature makes the brain more active and can spark ideas for people in creative work," Philips told QDaily. The claim comes out of a research fund NBBJ started in 2014, working with scholars in neuroscience and the social and behavioral sciences to explore where those fields meet architecture. Its first partner was John Medina, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Washington.

Because the buildings are so large, an office complex for a company like Alibaba can test theories that these overlapping fields have not yet proved. Take the "prospect-refuge theory" of the late geographer Jay Appleton, often used to explain why open-plan offices make people anxious: by instinct, people prefer to work somewhere open enough to watch their surroundings but private enough to stay apart — a cave in the middle of a plain. By that logic, an open office needs a few caves added to it.

Still, NBBJ's projects matter beyond design. Their sheer size tends to remake the local environment, the infrastructure, even the culture of the neighborhood. And for companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Samsung, a building is an essential part of the corporate image: just as a city usually has its landmark, these companies want a house with enough weight to stand for them.

Landmark! Landmark!

Comparing NBBJ's two Alibaba projects, Philips points to September 2014, when Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange, as the dividing line. Beyond the difference in scale, "today this multinational has to think about how the global market will look at it."

"In the United States we rarely use words like 'iconic' or 'distinctive' when we talk about a building. I mean this as a cultural difference, not a judgment. In fact I understand why people here are attached to landmarks. In China, the skyline, the height of a building and its shape have long been what city talk revolves around."

Early tech founders, Chinese or foreign, did not care what their offices looked like from the street. In Silicon Valley, where startups are born and die as a matter of routine, redoing only the interior was the cheaper bet. The office Facebook moved into had belonged to Sun Microsystems, which went bankrupt and was bought by Oracle. Mark Zuckerberg turned the Sun Microsystems sign around and painted his own Like button on the back, and kept many of the old logos on the glass. That anti-aesthetic, devil-may-care hacker streak survived into the new headquarters: even with Frank Gehry, who built the Guggenheim in Spain, the result, MPK20, still looks plain next to what other tech giants have put up, with exposed pipes and wiring everywhere. This time, though, they did build a nine-acre roof garden.

"Of course, when a client is set on being different for its own sake, my team and I still get nervous — especially if that is all they want." At the kickoff meeting Philips usually asks clients to list five things they want from a headquarters, then rank them. "In the end, the landmark gives way to function." Function and efficiency come first; nobody wants wasted floor area. The rest is usually cost and schedule. "'Iconic' still shows up on the list sometimes, but almost nobody puts it at the top now."

Even so, the global rush to build headquarters has produced plenty of landmarks. Norman Foster gave Apple a vast ring-shaped "spaceship" in Cupertino, and people marvel at the curved glass and the polished concrete ceiling panels; the design and the workmanship match the products the company makes.

BIG and Thomas Heatherwick designed clusters of movable, translucent glass tents for Google. In a 2015 company blog post, Google explained: "Instead of constructing immoveable concrete buildings, we'll create lightweight block-like structures which can be moved around easily" — inside the translucent canopies, temperature and humidity are controlled, and trees, landscaping, cafés and bike paths run through the structures. The aim was to erase the line between building and nature. NBBJ did something similar for Amazon in Seattle, putting up three glass domes and rebuilding nature inside an enormous greenhouse.

Strip away the simple hunger for a landmark, and what is left driving this?

What kind of office makes people creative?

Philips keeps returning to one conviction that now looks impossible to reverse: every global tech giant believes that when people who think for a living run into each other — especially people from different departments with different training — ideas follow. So architects try to manufacture as many of these aimless encounters as they can. They imitate street life, copy the functions of a city, and try to give a company's shared spaces the feel of a neighborhood.

Skeptics ask how anyone could measure whether the urge to build "community" is worth anything, particularly when no one can say how these clients define the word.

In the 1930s, looking for a quiet place to run experiments, AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories built the first corporate campus, in suburban New Jersey. On Facebook's campus today there is a resident medical team, a gym, bike paths, a screening room, dry cleaning — almost nothing you cannot get. Tech companies now supply nearly everything a traditional neighborhood does, except that everyone you meet works for the same employer. Chinese people who lived through the work-unit system will recognize this inward-facing version of community life.

Tencent's new Shenzhen headquarters stands on Binhai Avenue in the Nanshan district. Unlike tech companies that pick the suburbs, Tencent had no wide-open land and had to build upward. Two towers, joined by three sky bridges at different heights, are due to be finished in July 2017. Linking the interiors of two supertall buildings became the heart of the "vertical community": people move sideways across the three bridges, and run into each other along the way.

For Amazon's Seattle headquarters, NBBJ designed three low-energy domed greenhouses — the Spheres — built from tempered glass and low-energy electron diffraction technology. They will hold 3,000 plant species from around the world, and Amazon staff will meet, talk and eat lunch inside them. The Spheres also tie Amazon's office towers together; the whole project is due for completion in 2021.

Amazon and Tencent both gave up the option of going out to the far suburbs, copying a few urban functions and building a miniature city. They stand in the middle of a busy downtown instead, pulling street life into the office. Walk into the ground floor of Amazon's Seattle headquarters and for a moment you could think you had stepped into an ordinary shopping center: a florist, a grocery, a coffee shop.

"There's a standard criticism that everything we do is meant to tie employees to the company, and I can't agree with it. Work no longer has a clear boundary in time — a whistle to start, another to pack up and go home. Can creative workers still tell work from life? Neither can we architects. What everyone is doing is building the facilities this shift demands."

Philips stresses that the move from street to office should be seamless. "For anyone working here, you can't say where street life stops and work begins. There's a lot we can do by mixing public space and private space." Blurring that line is not new. People used to assume that founders decamped to campuses in the far suburbs out of a longing for country life and a dream of a utopia; this time the bet is on the opposite end — energy, the revival of the street, or simply a simulated city.

For all the effort designers put into engineering chance encounters, an invisible wall still separates the campus from the city. When Amazon's much-admired domes are finished, they will not open to the public any time soon. They stay the multinational's private garden.

What does a big company's new office actually change?

People admire the spaceship shape and the craftsmanship of Apple's new headquarters, a miniature city that can run on its own — so much so that it is cut off entirely from the fabric of Cupertino around it, an ordinary West Coast town of red brick and flat tile.

In 2012, The New York Times quoted an Apple executive: the iPhone sells in more than a hundred countries, and "we don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible." The architecture critic Alexandra Lange notes that you could swap "America" for "Cupertino" and the sentence would still hold: these companies do not necessarily care about connecting to the city they sit in. Steve Jobs might have objected. When he went before Cupertino's city officials to ask for permission to build, he made a point of saying how attached he was to the place, and promised to bring back the apricot orchards the town once had.

Not every company is content with an inward-facing miniature city. Intentionally or not, this wave of headquarters has changed the look of the cities that host it.

Samsung's headquarters in San Jose, California, is also NBBJ's work. Like any city built around the car, San Jose has little public space you can walk through. So NBBJ put genuine walking routes inside the building, and courtyards where people can stop and rest. Samsung has long been known for a strict hierarchy, but Philips stresses that Samsung asked for this from the first design meeting: to create the public space the city lacked. The 10-story tower works like a sandwich — a central courtyard at the bottom, walkways through the middle. The sports court, art space and coffee shop in the central courtyard will all be partly open to the public.

Google and Alibaba have begun reaching past the campus into the city too. In March 2011, Facebook sponsored an event outside its campus called Hack-A-Thon, inviting architects and urban planners to propose new ways to connect the campus site with what surrounds it, including the marshland. In the 2015 blog post introducing its headquarters design, Google talked about adding bike paths and retail for the surrounding neighborhood. In November 2016, Google sat down for the first time with the government of Mountain View, where it is based, to discuss building housing near the campus. Alibaba has started looking into how to provide schooling for employees' children.

The most immediate effect of a big company arriving in a neighborhood, of course, is that housing prices go up. Silicon Valley is not only a case study in technical invention; it is the clearest illustration of how large companies move real estate prices. The story of how Twitter angered San Francisco shows that a corporate headquarters is not automatically good for the city it lands in. It is closer to a contradiction.

For a tech giant like Alibaba, what does this shift mean — from worshipping landmarks to building an inward-facing community — for the company, and for the city?

One thing is certain: something will change. The Chinese tech companies Philips deals with have started asking designers whether they could open at least part of a campus that was built to be closed, and let the rest of the city in. He is cautiously optimistic about where that leads: "You can feel that the conversation has started."

(Images without a credit were supplied by NBBJ)