Apple's Spaceship, Amazon's Bubble: 10 Hip Tech Headquarters
World-famous architects are turning their attention to eye-catching, high-tech headquarters for some of the biggest names in the tech industry. From Apple, to Facebook, to Amazon, here are our 10 favorites.
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Businesses such as Facebook, Uber, and Amazon are better known for their ubiquitous presence in our lives than for any particular grace in design aesthetics. How many times have we all complained about Facebook's umpteenth change for the better? However, when it comes to corporate headquarters, these companies, and many others, are employing the best and the brightest in the fields of architecture and interior design.
We've come a long way from Microsoft's bland, boxy campus outside Seattle. Instead, in the city's downtown, Amazon looks to be taking a page from Logan's Run with a series of steel and glass domes that look more like futuristic biospheres than they do offices for an online retail giant.
Meanwhile, in Cupertino, Calif., Apple, perhaps the only company on this list known best for the sleek, high-fashion design of its products, is building an enormous, ring-shaped HQ designed by British architect Norman Foster. It calls to mind a giant silver spaceship that landed in a forest.
On the other side of the world, in the coastal city of Changle, China, Liu Dejian, one of that nation's wealthiest individuals and the founder of online game developer NetDragon Websoft, took his Star Trek fandom to the ultimate level by spending $100 million on an office HQ resembling the USS Enterprise spaceship.
The concept of a landmark headquarters for a major corporation is nothing new, and neither is the process of hiring a name-brand architect to design one. Frank Gehry, probably the best-known architect working today, designed Facebook's new campus, and the IAC center in New York City, which was his first building in the nation's largest city.
Other headquarters are less conspicuous but equally innovative and alluring. Airbnb's San Francisco headquarters boasts a soaring atrium with a living wall, for example.
Take a tour of some of the world's most impressive tech headquarters and tells us what you think -- terrific or tacky -- in the comments section below.
Completed earlier this year, Facebook's new campus in Menlo Park, Calif., eschews architect Frank Gehry's signature billowing stainless steel forms for a more subdued -- and, at times, submerged -- aesthetic. The sprawling building features a massive green roof with plants and trails, as well as flowing space that provides room for approximately 3,000 employees.
Three high-rise office towers, two mid-rise office buildings, and one multipurpose meeting center form the core of this plan. The main attraction is a lacy, five-story structure made up of three intersecting spheres, which will house retail space, plants, and trees. The globes range in height from 80 to 95 feet.
The young company turned to architecture firm Gensler to express its ethos of openness, collaboration and constant enterprise -- all in the comfort of home. Combining raw concrete with living walls, soft, warm woods with white painted steel structural elements, the office is a mix of high-tech and low key.
Ride-sharing startup Uber isn't skimping on the glass for its San Francisco headquarters. The project, designed by SHoP architects, sprawls over two buildings and will be able to hold 3,000 people when it opens in late 2017 or early 2018. Located in the Mission Bay neighborhood, the building will have retail space on the ground floor to keep the street scene lively.
Home to Google and global media and marketing services company Mindshare, among others, this mixed-used building complex is designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. It features strikingly colored facades covered with 134,000 glazed tiles in vivid shades of green, orange, lime, and yellow. In addition to tech companies and retail shops, wealthy London residents also call the complex home.
Built next to Comcast's Philadelphia headquarters, the company's Innovation & Technology Center is a collaboration between Foster (exterior) and Gensler (interior). It will be the tallest building in the city of Brotherly Love, rising to a height of 1,121 feet. The $1.2 billion building will feature a state-of-the-art media center, as well as a 200-room Four Seasons luxury hotel.
This multi-phase project, located on Roosevelt Island in the East River of New York City, will boast new university programs. These include a partnership between Cornell University and the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology. Students here can earn graduate degrees in business, computing, and engineering. The centerpiece program is to be the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.
The most outrageous building on this list naturally comes from China, home of some of the world's most dazzling -- albeit aesthetically questionable -- feats of architecture and engineering. The headquarters for online game developer NetDragon Websoft was commissioned by founder, Liu Dejian -- possibly the world's biggest Star Trek fan -- and bears a striking and intentional resemblance to the USS Enterprise spacecraft.
The most outrageous building on this list naturally comes from China, home of some of the world's most dazzling -- albeit aesthetically questionable -- feats of architecture and engineering. The headquarters for online game developer NetDragon Websoft was commissioned by founder, Liu Dejian -- possibly the world's biggest Star Trek fan -- and bears a striking and intentional resemblance to the USS Enterprise spacecraft.
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