Despite Facebook’s turn as a tool of the empire, this video tells the story of their experiments in office park and urban design.Â
Ultimately, though, we’ve gotta give them credit for pushing Silicon Valley well outside its car-park comfort zone to offer a pedestrian pocket of productivity in a sea of some of the most banal, soul-crushing, suburban wastelands around.
We cheer Facebook’s human-scale building strategies, while still reminding everyone that Frank Gehry’s industrial modernism is best when used sparingly. It should be seen as filling in between an existing historic urban fabric. But this is California after all, so even doing as much as they have is a true miracle.
The upcoming Willow Campus residential-focused, vertical mixed-use development earns 4 out of 5 B4place stars for pushing so hard, when most of their contemporaries are still contributing to the sprawl.