Morphosis will design a new high-tech global headquarters for lululemon in Vancouver, Canada. Working with Francl Architecture and Clive Wilkinson Architects, the team will create the main office to serve as an extension of the core values of the brand itself. The design for the 13-story headquarters is made to create strong connections between the building and its site, landscape, and community, with exterior and interior spaces that encourage collaboration and innovation.
MDC 2015 is headlined by an impressive panel of internationally acclaimed architects whose insights will spark your creative energy and rekindle your passion for design. Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger of Barkow Leibinger, Junya Ishigami of Junya Ishigami + Associates, Carme Pinós of Estudio Carme Pinós and Bernard Tschumi of Bernard Tschumi Architects are set to join you in Monterey alongside renown U.S. architects such as Clive Wilkinson, FAIA of Clive Wilkinson architects and Rand Elliott of Elliott + Associates Architects. Sprinkled among the headliners are imaginative presentations from some of California’s finest emerging talent and an array of continuing education options which will round out the weekend. This conference will inspire participants and remind you of why you got into architecture in the first place.
HP, Apple, Google – they all found their success amongst the peach groves and Suburban houses of California. But why? What is it about Silicon Valley that makes it the site of technological innovation the world over?
It’s tempting to assume that the Valley’s success must be, at least in part, due to its design. But how does innovation prosper? What kind of environment does it require? In a recent interview with The Atlantic Cities, Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, suggests that creativity is sparked from casual exchanges, the mingling of diversity, the constant interaction with the strange and new. In short, and as a recent study corroborates, innovation flourishes in dense metropolises.
Seemingly then, Silicon Valley, a sprawl of highways and office parks, has become a hotspot of creativity in spite of its design. But let’s not write off design just yet.
As technology makes location more and more irrelevant, many are looking to distill the magic of Silicon Valley and transplant it elsewhere. The key will be to design environments that can recreate the Valley’s culture of collaboration. The future Valleys of the world will be microsystems of creativity that imitate and utilize the structure of the city.
When Apple revealed the plans for their new campus in Cupertino, the responses to the “spaceship” were….varied, to say the least:
“Spectacular would be an understatement” ; “So disappointing…” ; a “…panopti-lawn…” ; and – my personal favorite – “Sphincter?” [1]
The announcement instigated a flurry of analyses and criticisms over the meaning of the design for the world – the Zen-like significance of the circle, the role of architecture in this technologically-driven age, the legacy and hubris of Jobs – but produced very little discussion over its meaning for the company itself.
Meanwhile, months before news of the “spaceship” landed, another internet giant was searching the California landscape for its own space to call home. Still very much under-wraps, the new Googleplex will be the first time Google builds a workplace completely from scratch. [2]
These projects will be the Magnum Opuses, the ultimate physical representations, of the two most influential Tech companies in the world, and the two share striking similarities. So let’s clash the plans of these two titans and take another look at Apple 2 – but this time in the light of Google – and see what they can tell us about these companies’ futures.
