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….