The Challenge of the Suburban Office Landscape Understanding the Past to Re-envision the Future
Planning for the 21st Century Emerging Trends
Caltrans Transportation Planning Speaker Series
October 19, 2015
The business as usual environment of the suburban office (Silicon Valley)
How did we get here? What are the forces of change?
Are there new models for the suburban (Silicon Valley) office?
Louise Mozingo, Professor & Chair Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning
University of California, Berkeley
Historian
Director, Center for Resource Efficient Communities (CREC) crec.berkeley.edu
First a little history…
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corporate campus R & D staffs corporate estate
Executive staffs
office park
Suburban workplaces that corporations built for themselves
Speculative investments
built by developers for tenant
corporations
Suburban office types distinguished by their site plans
Managerial Capitalism - Three tiers of management
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Corporate Campus
AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories opened 1942 planned 1929-30 Summit, New Jersey
The first corporate campus
Inventions Bell Labs 1948
the transistor the bit
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General Motors Technical Center 1956 Warren, Michigan
Ramo-Wooldridge Laboratories 1958 Canoga Park, California
IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory 1977 near San Jose, CA
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Boeing Longacres Park 1997 ongoing Renton, WA
Managerial Capitalism - Three tiers of management
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Corporate Estate
Connecticut General Life Insurance Company 1957 Bloomfield, Connecticut
Deere & Company Administrative Center 1964 Moline, Illinois
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Weyerhaeuser Corporate Headquarters 1971 outside Tacoma, WA
Union Carbide 1982 Danbury, Connecticut
Codex Headquarters 1989 Canton, MA
Apple 2 Campus 2011 Cupertino, CA
Under construction
Managerial Capitalism - Three tiers of management
+ Start-ups Service businesses
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Office parks
Office Park
Research parks Business parks Corporate parks Science parks Technology parks Software parks Corporate campuses
The Office Park 1952 Mountain Brook, AL
Waltham Research Park 1958 Route 128 (later I-95) around Boston, MA
Stanford Industrial Park 1954 (later renamed the Stanford Research Park) Palo Alto, California
Stanford University, for-profit
Stanford Research Park
Research Triangle Park North Carolina, 1958 Research Triangle Foundation, not-for-profit
Cornell Oaks Corporate Center 1988 ���Washington County, OR
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Office parks dominate the Bay Area high technology landscape
Upscale Silicon Valley: The compact campus within the office park Apple HQ Cupertino, CA
Googleplex, Mountainview, California (formerly SGI)
The Postwar Center City – crowded, “congested,” and diverse
GE Schenectady “works”
General Electric Laboratories
Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize 1932 with Guiglielmo Marconi
“A view of patio and pool contributes to precision engineering” GM Tech Center, Where Today Meets Tomorrow, 1956
General Electric Electronics Park 1948 Syracuse, New York
“Work goes on in a campus-like atmosphere that the brainy��� youngsters seem to go for” BusinessWeek 1952
Corporate Campus Office Park
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1. Low density and heavily landscaped to both meld with middle class communities and to reflect “ideal suburban living” of the 1940s and 1950s
2. Intended to “capture” employees for the entire day with limited ways in and out, deliberately lacking pedestrian and other transportation connections to the larger landscape—no public realm
3. Entirely auto-dependent
Corporate Estate
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The separatist geography of business
Office parks well suit the Silicon valley entrepreneurial cycle
The forces of change and the responses to them…
Parking lot and freeway transportation model does not address current transporation issues much less a post peak oil and water future
Greater demand from suburban residents for an enriched, community serving public realm
Millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025
77% of Millenials plan to live in the urban core
However digitally connected, 60% of millenials prefer in person collaboration
Source: Kilroy Realty Corporation
Source: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute & Kilroy Realty Corporation
The “brainy youngsters” are trending urban and urbane
San Francisco “Parklet”
Weyerhaeuser Corporate Headquarters is moving…
…to downtown Seattle
Source: Mithun
Recycling of suburban sites
Source: City of Santa Clara
Source: City of Santa Clara
Santana Row, San Jose, California
Source: Federal Realty Investment Trust
500 Santana Row Shared public space
Source: Federal Realty Investment Trust
Crossing | 900 Transit Oriented Development in downtown Redwood City
Source: Kilroy Realty Corporation
LandBank redevelopment, Sunnyvale, CA
Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, CA���built 1995, bought by Facebook 2011
New Facebook Campus
Facebook is increasing square footage and reducing car trips by 50%
Apple 2 Campus Cupertino, CA
Under construction
Increase building from 2,660,000sf to 3,630,000sf Decrease impervious surface 130.4 acres to 74 acres
The Hamptons From 392 units to 942
The Hills at Vallco
Where all this does this leave us….
