The recently revealed plans for the new campuses of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., designed by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, and Apple, in Cupertino, from Sir Norman Foster, are so striking: They, like the companies they will house, point to the future — the future, that is, as it looked in the 1960s. Images of the projected Apple campus — a four-tiered ringlike structure nestled in a thickly wooded landscape — evoke the landing of an alien spaceship. The central structure in Ingels’s and Heatherwick’s design is canopied by a sinuous glass membrane, a protective bubble or amniotic sac, shielding an entire section of the campus — not just buildings but bike paths and desks — while letting the abundant Northern California light stream in. In aerial renderings it looks like larvae, incubating a new and possibly terrifying future.
The new unearthly Silicon Valley campuses represent the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few. Neither the Google nor Apple campus is open to the public, nor are their designs replicable on the scale that the ’60s utopians imagined for their designs. Well after the orchards of Northern California were overwhelmed by glass boxes and suburban tracts, the tech companies find themselves looking longingly at an Edenic, prelapsarian moment, when it seemed that — to adapt a more recent slogan — another world was possible. But what was originally borne from improvisation and a desire to live simply is now borne from unimaginable mountains of cash. The new Apple office will cost an estimated $5 billion, making it possibly the most expensive office building in history. We are dealing with a bubble of a different kind.
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