More Than 8,000 People Are Moving Into Ant Group's Headquarters. How Many Needs Does It Have to Cover?

Apart from not providing housing, this place is no different from a city, or a very large residential community.

A company can be a city in miniature. Some take a paternalistic approach to workers' lives: feeding and housing them, maintaining the roads and the sewers, selling them goods, even running the schools their children attend.

The point of these company towns was to fence off a patch of territory where a firm could manage labor and resources more easily. An article in The Economist counted hundreds of such companies in the early-20th-century United States; the towns and small cities they scattered across the country housed as much as 3% of the American population.

Most company towns ended badly once the industries that built them moved on, but variants of them are thriving in the campus boom now sweeping the biggest technology companies: Apple, Google, Amazon, Tencent and Alibaba — the standard-bearers of peak productivity — have all put up buildings of every shape to enclose the food, clothing and daily needs of tens of thousands of people.

The latest example is the headquarters Ant Group built for 1.13 billion yuan.

This is Alibaba Group's third campus of its own in Hangzhou, after its Binjiang headquarters and Taobao City in Yuhang. It is also the company's third mass relocation, following the move of 6,000 Alibaba employees across the river to Binjiang in 2009 and the mobilization of more than 10,000 to Taobao City in 2013.

Until the new campus was finished, Ant Group's employees worked in leased space in Building B of Huanglong Times Square, two kilometers away.

Alipay, Ant Group's predecessor, had 22 employees when it was founded in 2004, and business grew fast enough to make the old offices feel cramped. Ground broke on the new building in 2012, before Ant Group itself existed; by then Alipay had more than 3,600 employees.

It was once called the "Alipay Building," but the campus's official name is "Z Space." Nine floors across several joined buildings, it holds more than 8,000 employees. It sits on a long, narrow site between two hills in the Xixi area, with hills closing in on two sides. One neighbor is Xixi Xinzuo, a residential and retail development; across a main road is the conference center of Zhejiang University's science park.

A campus this big — more than 180,000 square meters of land, 80,000 square meters of floor space — is one way a company displays its money and its energy. Like other large companies that favor star architects — Apple hired Norman Foster; Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California was designed by the Dutch firm OMA; BIG and Thomas Heatherwick designed Google's movable, translucent glass tents — Ant Group turned to an architecture firm, NBBJ, for Z Space.

The work NBBJ has done for big technology companies shares two traits: it is enormous, and it plays up the feel of technology. For Amazon's Seattle headquarters the firm built three glass domes that recreate nature inside giant greenhouses. In San Jose, a city organized around the car, it gave Samsung's U.S. headquarters the public space the place lacked, opening a courtyard where anyone can stop and sit.

Z Space, too, presents itself through size and optimistic planning. The name comes from its shape: a Z that people have joked looks like it is sticking its backside out.

Eric Philips, NBBJ's partner in Asia, once explained the project's design thinking this way: "Just as Alipay built a powerful commercial center in the virtual world, we wanted the architecture to show that same free flow of money and goods, to create a series of connection points that imitate the nodes of an internet transaction — or, to put it another way, the smooth feel of the main shopping street in a busy commercial district."

Several design firms competed for the project before construction began. The choice of architect fell to Ant Group's administrative department, which also handles everything to do with running the campus day to day: the move itself, property management and the rest.

The head of that department never once mentioned the aesthetics or the ideas NBBJ built into the design. Taste and style, said this person, who asked not to be named, were not the first criteria for picking an architecture firm. To the administrative staff, choosing a designer looked more like the rational output of a formula: weighting factors such as price, feasibility, research method and style differently across the competing bids.

For a company, building a campus is both practical and symbolic. A modern management philosophy may be hidden behind it, but what fills the building is what keeps it running.

Like the company towns before it, Ant Group's new campus looks capable of anything. Besides a cafeteria that serves four meals a day, there are 18 food and drink outlets of different kinds, a 24-hour convenience store and coffee machines wherever you turn. Inside, a gym of nearly 1,000 square meters is free for employees, and a session with a personal trainer costs half what it does outside. From an Ant Group post office that handles 4,000 pieces of mail to a fruit market, a flower shop and a police office that registers residents and processes household registration, the campus compresses the functions of a neighborhood, even a small town, into one place.

One fairly common argument treats company perks as an important way to build loyalty, though critics call the same strategy another form of labor control.

Paternalistic, exploitative or somewhere in between — the carrot and the stick — all of these have worked as ways to manage the relationship between a company and its workers. If a company owns the infrastructure its employees need, giving them good places to live and convenient services can keep them happy and productive.

But "benefits" today has been broken down far past anything a phrase like "assign employees housing" or "hand out equity" can cover.

Compared with the Silicon Valley companies that once advertised their geek culture with ping-pong tables, foosball and coffee bars, the fashion on today's big campuses is for green building and natural landscape.

Apple Park planted more than 8,000 trees in the greenery around its new campus. Amazon recreates nature inside giant glass greenhouses. Google has tried to erase the line between nature and building, putting up translucent glass tents with controlled temperature and humidity and threading coffee bars, plantings and bike paths through them.

Z Space is also thinking about greenery for its nearly 10,000 occupants. Outdoors it has laid out plenty of plants that suit Hangzhou's climate and look good; indoors it has put 11,000 pots of pothos.

Desks are spread evenly along the windows, so 80% of employees can see a mass of green from where they sit. This linear arrangement also rests on the theory of the walking meeting: "If employees walk for three to five minutes before a discussion, they make more creative decisions."

The wood surfaces throughout the building come from old timber pulled out of demolished houses, left unpainted and unwaxed. Maximizing daylight and using environmentally friendly glass are moves plenty of architecture firms make, but taken as a whole, Z Space really is designed to the standard of LEED Gold, the American green-building certification.

The arrangement of office space is another fine-grained problem designers have begun to treat as a question of demographics. It is an attempt to find, inside the relationship between a company and its workers, the place where their interests overlap — and it points, in the end, at the company's efficiency and its profits.

Ant Group's businesses include Alipay, Yu'e Bao, Koubei, Huabei and Sesame Credit. The first 3,000-plus employees to move into Z Space came mostly from Koubei, the international business and customer service. The 5,000-odd remaining places on campus have not been opened yet, but administrative staff told QDaily they are reserved for employees of Alibaba's Digital Media and Entertainment Group. The Ant Group employees still at the old site will move into another new building a few kilometers away over the next few years.

That makes customer service the largest group at Z Space after the IT department, which accounts for 40% of the people in the building. Like the IT staff, customer service employees skew sharply toward one gender: nearly 90% of Ant Group's customer service workers are women.

Their needs became an important design standard too.

A quiet corner of every floor holds a nursing room with its own card access, the walls finished in sound-absorbing eco-friendly felt. Each room has an ergonomic recliner where pregnant employees can rest, and the privacy of the pumping room makes it easier for employees to nurse or express milk after giving birth. In the lounge for employees' families, a children's play area and an infant rest area were set up separately, for the different needs of babies and older children.

In practice, the nature of customer service work cuts against humane design: employees take an almost unbroken stream of calls and online requests and can rarely get up for long. The overlap of interests Ant Group could find came down to ergonomic chairs. Beyond that, the company put a number of microwaves in the customer service area so employees who cannot get away to the cafeteria can heat their food and eat nearby.

The broader answer to the efficiency problem is the layout of the office itself.

The age of the dreary cubicle is plainly over, but a purely open plan does not necessarily serve the interests of either the company or its employees.

NBBJ's answer was modular, varied space. The building has open workstations, more private ones screened by partitions, and movable desks and sit-stand desks employees can use to shift gears.

The need to work together is met by rows of enclosed meeting rooms beside the desks and by sofa areas for discussion. Under the nickname culture Alibaba promotes, all 130 meeting rooms in the building are named after old Chinese private banks, or qianzhuang; 60% to 70% of them have video cameras, and they are spread evenly across the floors.

The evidence behind these efficiency-minded designs came from data sampling done by a research team.

That may be one reason Alibaba picked NBBJ. In settling on a design, the architects analyzed how each employee interacted with their work area, using a method of their own that the firm calls computational data. In the data they gathered, employees from different departments appear as dots of different colors. The movement of the dots traces where they walk over a day; lines show the probability that two employees can see each other.

"A lot of our clients like this way of deciding by data, because it has grounds and doesn't waste effort," NBBJ's lead on the project told QDaily.

Data does not stop at the office layout. It seeps into all sorts of details.

The campus cafeteria seats 2,000 people at once. That is already vast, but it still has to be squeezed for efficiency. Beyond the simple trick of staggering mealtimes, its 10 counters — Western food, noodles and pastries, Sichuan and Hunan dishes, dry pot, steamed dishes, set meals, a coffee bar — differ in size and in how the queue is routed. The arrangements draw on historical data from Alibaba's other campuses, and keep the wait at each counter under 15 minutes.

A famous designer, an enormous footprint and functions that cover nearly everything have turned the campus into something close to a miniature community. But you can also see the functions it has shed.

Z Space does not house its employees the way Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California does. Nor did Ant Group, in moving, offer employees the discounted home prices Alibaba offered when it went to Taobao City in Yuhang in 2013. That cross-district move of 10,000 people drove nearby home prices up by 70%; rented farmhouses in the area, which few people had wanted before, now go for more than twice what they did.

Instead, everything outside its core competitiveness — catering, retail, management, even the move itself — is contracted out, so the company can concentrate on the core. This makes a company more flexible and more efficient, and it delivers large profits to shareholders.

The head of the administrative department said that, as with choosing an architecture firm, they have a set of criteria for choosing the businesses that move in: employee demand, brand, reputation, operating ability and how readily the vendor takes to technology.

As on Alibaba's other campuses, catering at the Z Space cafeteria is contracted to the British group Compass. The kind of client it keeps says something about the company's standing: 90 of the Fortune Global 100 outsource their catering to Compass.

The fruit shop and the flower shop inside the building are both local Hangzhou chains that met the company's requirements for quality and operating ability. Vendors that serve employees better get better terms. Z Space has a 24-hour FamilyMart at the foot of the building and another inside it. FamilyMart pays no rent to be there, and its customers are not limited to people who work on campus.

The last question is openness. Whether a campus should be closed or open has become a sharper point of argument in design. But it mostly comes down to the client.

As Steve Jobs's last work, Apple's headquarters is a masterpiece no one would deny. But its giant ring encloses 260,000 square meters of forest, and it has been attacked as antisocial and anti-urban. In Norman Foster's renderings of the Apple campus, the campus is the subject and there are barely any people; they have been taken out. What that "seemingly open pastoralism" reveals, they wrote, is in fact a break with the city and the community.

Closed technology campuses used to be common. Facebook has not disclosed the details of its Willow Campus headquarters. But after Apple was criticized as an island, both the designer, OMA, and Facebook made a point in their early publicity of stressing Willow Campus's ties to the community around it.

NBBJ's portfolio holds plenty of open work. It once broke through Samsung's strict hierarchy and opened parts of the company's U.S. headquarters to outsiders — a sports field, an art zone and a café in the central courtyard — which helped the Korean company build an image in the United States.

Z Space has no traditional wall or railing either; greenery is all that separates the edge of the campus from the main road. Everything except the interior of the buildings, sealed behind layer after layer of access control, is open: residents can walk in and wander freely through the plaza, the ground floors, the shops and more than 7,000 square meters of landscaping.

They also plan to bring public art installations or exhibitions onto the campus. There is no firm plan yet, the administrative head said, but the China Academy of Art, also in Hangzhou, is likely to be one source of the work.

Only one thing seems odd. At companies that make so much of technology, a staffed front desk is a rare sight. Every building at Z Space has one, and whether you work there or not, if you sit down in the lounge on the ground floor the receptionist will bring you tea.

Right next to the front desk stand an unstaffed shop and vending machines — the unstaffed supermarkets and convenience stores Alibaba later opened to the public were first tested here on campus — where you can try the most advanced way of buying things, one that requires no contact with a person from beginning to end.

One thing is certain: if you walk past the front desk into the unstaffed retail area, the tea will not follow you in.

Cover image and in-article images (unless otherwise noted) courtesy of: Ant Group.