Corporate Ville: leisure as commodity

CORPORATE VILLE leisure as commodity

Dario Marcobelli Architectural Association London Mphil Architecture and Urban Design PROJECTIVE CITIES 2015-2017 Tutor: Sam Jaboby, Platon Issias, Maria S. Giudici

Acknowledgements I am grateful to my tutor Dr. Sam Jacoby for his guidance through the research project.

I would like to thank Dr. Adrian Lahoud , Dr. Platon Issias and Dr. Maria S. Giudici for the critical feedbacks. I am grateful to my dear colleague Seyithan, Jose, Talia, Ilias, Claudio and Suchendra for the help along the way.

I would like to express my gratitude to those who supported me during my studies and in particular my parents for their unconditional support.

This dissertation is dedicated to them and to my family.

Authorship Declaration “I certify that this piece of work is entirely my own and that any quotation or paraphrase from published or unpublished work of others is duly ackowledged.�

Signature of Student:

09.06.2017

Table of contents

Abstract

Introduction : toward corporateville

Chapter 1 Leisure as collective form

The State’s instrumentalisation of leisure Village as collective model

Chapter 2 The leisure workscape

Leisure-based working culture

From static to movement, from building to village

Chapter 3 Corporateville Design brief

Conclusion : Village as corporate model

Bibliography

Image credits

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between corporate environments and leisure activities in the reorganisation of work in tech industries. Activities traditionally associated with leisure have become subservient to work and interiorised in the workspace. With this, a new work experience has emerged. The research investigates how the architectural re-configuration of the corporate workspace through furniture layouts and spatial design makes evident a progressive regulation of social interaction. Informal interactions become a basis of work productivity by adapting private habits in the corporate environment. This interrelation of private and work life is particularly evident in the Silicon Valley. Project-based working and project management relies on efficient interaction within teams, with leisure providing protocols and a collective ethos that enhance trust and regulate social interaction.

The thesis studies the significance of leisure’s institutionalisation in France and Germany in the 1930s. Leisure was instrumental to foster national identity by collectivising originally private habits. With the advent of mass tourism, the tourist village created a new shared lifestyle. It was an architectural paradigm of how private activities, such as eating, playing and sleeping, become collective. Later corporate management adopted this idea of the collective as productive. Productivity was seen as an outcome of a social system in which protocols of leisure played a cohesive role.

Responding to these economic and spatial transformations, the dissertation rethinks the formation of protocols in relation to live-work cycles. By establishing a collective ethos through shared routines, the project mitigates hierarchies, embracing a new corporate management style. The design investigation hereby returns to elements of the village as spatial framework to transform the workspace. The urban condition of the village, not only in the sense of co-existence of life and work but also through its architectural elements, already exists in the tech industry headquarter. It is therefore exploited in a new model that contrast with the spatial and programmatic division of the American suburb as expressed by Silicon Valley. The proposed multi-scalar and strategic reconfiguration raises new questions regarding the regulation of private protocols for production.

Fig.01 Proposal for the new Google Campus by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California.

Fig.02 Proposal for the new Google Campus by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California.

Fig.03 Proposal for the new Google Campus by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California.

‘Nearly two-thirds of companies responding to the survey report the average space per person is currently 150 square feet* or less.

Slightly over half of the respondents project an average of 100 square feet** or less per worker as the norm in five years.’

CoreNet Global, ‘Property Paradox: Space for Office Workers Continues to Decline, Even as Companies Expect Hiring to Increase in Months Ahead’ (2013) *

13 square metres 9 quare metres

**

AMERICAN TIME USE SURVEY (ATUS)

from 2001 to 2015 for civilian population 15 years old and over chosen from household, all major activity categories include related travel time

Consumer goods purchases Professional and personal care services

Housework Food preparation and cleanup Lawn and garden care Household management

Caring for and helping household children Caring for and helping household adults Purchasing good and services Household activities Caring for and helping household members

Working and work-related activities Working

OECD classification time-use (2006) UN-PAID WORK

Working and work-related activities

PAID WORK OR STUDY LEISURE TIME according to Aguiar and Hurst (2007)

Sleeping Grooming (bathing, dressing, haircut)

PERSONAL CARE LEISURE

Personal care

Socialising and communicating Health related self-care

Eating and drinking

Watching television

Leisure and sports

Participating in sports, exercise, and recreation

Organisational, civic, and religious activities Educational activities

Religious and spiritual activities Volunteering Civic obbligation

Attending class Homework and research AVERAGE PERCENT ENGAGED IN THE ACTIVITY PER DAY Weekdays

Weekend and holidays

AVERAGE TIME PER PERSON WHO ENGAGE THE ACTIVITY Weekdays

Weekend and holidays

53.1%

22.1%

8.42 h

5.80 h

51.0%

21.1%

7.93 h

5.55 h

0.49 h

0.25 h

work-related activities: ‘include activities that are not obviously work but are done as part of one's job, such as having a business lunch and playing golf with clients.’

LEISURE SPACES 45%

rooftop

mechanics + service

open office space

1971 Willis & Dumas HQ

LEISURE SPACES 40%

restaurant + cafe

circulation + mechanics + service

open and closed office space

1997 Villa VPRO

LEISURE SPACES 42%

gym + running track

service + circulation

open and closed office space

2009 dtach House

LEISURE SPACES 55%

rooftop

circulation + lobbies closed office

open office

2015 New Facebook HQ

The term corporation derives from late Latin corporatio(n-) and, from Latin verb ‘corporare’, its meaning is ‘to combine in one body’ Oxford dictionary

‘By having an open floor plan where people work close to each other, it facilitates people sharing and communicating about what they are doing which we think is key to building the best services for our community.’

Mark Zuckerberg1 The above is part of Mark Zuckerberg’s description of Facebook’s Headquarter in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, California. Taken from a 2015 YouTube video, the words of Facebook’s CEO lead us to acknowledge the ambition of the company to furnish an imaginary of the total community. As the journalist David Kirkpatrick wrote, the image of the community is firmly grounded in the organisation. In fact, the social philosopher and media theorist Marshall Mc Luhan who, in 1964, predicted the development of a universal communications platform that would unite the planet by the term ‘the global village’2 ‘is a favourite at the company’.3 As Zuckerberg continues pointing at his desk, it is located in the middle of the largest open office without any movable partitions and indistinguishable from a normal employee’s desks.4 The CEO then shows his meeting room that is a diaphanous box with a conference table and a couch that allow the employees to look in from the outside. The office set up clearly expresses the CEO’s intention to present work as collaborative work. It relies on understanding office design not only related to mere production but also encouraging communication in a global context of non-represented hierarchies. Zuckerberg’s vision has to be understood in the context of the corporate organisation. As Reinhold Martin has stressed, with post-war disputes about the operative value of the relation between manager and employee, an endeavour to integrate the corporation into the ‘social system’ arose in the America during the 1930s.5 Sociality was meant to be a tool for creating a more egalitarian office. Therefore, the office came to engender a shared commitment that would ameliorate relations between the employees and employers.

Fig.04 The Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at his desk in the New Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, California. Behind, his glazed conference room.

20

Introduction : toward corporateville

1

‘Mark Zuckerberg - First live video at Facebook Headquarters’, September 14 2015, 0.49. Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BPQz5PZo6nQ [accessed on 17 April 2017] 2

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : the Extensions of Man (London : Routledge Classics, 2001).

3

David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect : The Real Inside Story of Mark Zuckerberg and the World’s Fastest Growing Company (London : Virgin, 2011) p 332 4

Mark Zuckerberg gives Tour of the New Facebook HQ’, September 16 2015, 1.09. Available at https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iVsUwF4L6Nc [accessed on 17 April 2017]

Nonetheless, the idea of the ‘global village’ or the community phantasmagoria within the workspace is not new. In the opening ceremony for the new General Life Insurance headquarter in the suburbs of Hereford, Connecticut in 1957, the developer James W. Rouse described the new building as a ‘device for creating community’.6 The dissertation points at a more general context in which productivity has been attached to forming of a social group. To this end, the investigation singles out ground-breaking corporative examples were the concept of ‘humanisation’, ‘home’ and ‘city’ represented the integration of the workforce into a cohesive social system. The work investigates the trajectory of these examples in their spatial and programmatic transformation.

However, during the 1940s, the most powerful American companies decentralised their headquarters to the suburban area. The most important reasons were the increasing of the complexity of the managerial asset, the concern about an atomic attack in the central areas and the unsavory social and physical situation of the city.

Decentralisation became exploited to reorganise the labour force and create cohesion among staff. According to Louise Mozingo, post-war decentralised ‘corporations allied themselves with the image and […] values of an idealized […] America : the edifying civility of bucolic small towns, technological modernity in service to lifeenhancing progress, and the nuclear family ensconced in material comfort’.7 Following Mozingo, those companies reinforced a social distinction grounded on the American consumerist goods. The suburban landscape, technological comfort and – in the case of the General Life Insurance headquarter – the provision of unprecedented amenities8 stood for American suburban lifestyle resonating with the labour force. The corporation represented itself through ‘everyday physicality’ and ‘as seamless with traditional American culture’.9 Additionally, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently explained to Bloomberg – posted on Facebook on the 16th November 2016 that the famous Google provision of food to all employees is conceived to strengthen the collaboration between teams by creating family-like relationships.10

5

One fundamental publication for this trajectory highlighted

by Martin was Mayo, Elton, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York : Macmillian Co., 1933). In the book, productivity was linked to the sense of identification with the corporate institution.

Thus, one strategy for increasing production within the factory was to enhance the membership of a social group.

6

Nicholas Adams, Skidmore, Owings & Merril : the Experiment since 1936 (Milan : Electa, 2006) p 92 7

Corporation allied themselves with the image and, by implication, values of an idealized, if not quite real, America : the edifying civility of bucolic small towns, technological modernity in service to life-enhancing progress, and the nuclear family ensconced in material comfort. Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism : A History of Suburban Corporate (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2011) p 42-43 8

Large cafeteria, snack and soda bar, ping pong table, shuffleboard, barbershop, beauty parlor, cardroom, lounge, game room, ice-skating pond, variety stores, lending library, delivery service, gas station, auditorium, twelve bowling alleys, four tennins courts, six horsehoe pits, lawn games, picnic grounds with barbecue pits, and a quiet room for noontime meditation.

Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism p 113 9

Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism p 43

10

Erich Schmidt on Google’s unique culture’, 16 November 2016. Available at https:// www.bloomberg.com/ news/videos/2016-11-16/ eric-schmidt-on-google-sunique-culture [accessed on 3rd May 20017]

Fig.05 Promotional picture of the Connecticut General Life Insurance headquarter, Hereford, Connecticut.

Introduction: toward corporateville

21

These instances outline a direct connection between the inclusion of amenities and the formation of a corporate identity. Moreover, it makes explicit the interiorisation of modes of collective living – based on activities normally associated with non-work – subservient to productivity. Hence, it leads us to question leisure – understood as a non-productive time and space – in creative corporations. Therefore the thesis’s preliminary question:

How does leisure, understood as an idea of community building, increase productivity in creative industries?

The dissertation addresses creative industries – and specifically creative production – about the method of production. According to Paolo Virno, in the transition from the Fordist to post-Fordist era, productivity came gradually to be regulated by the way employees and managers interact. Specifically, he underpins that creative industries are typified by ‘production of communication by means of communication’.11 While sociality was intended to make employees at ease, nowadays large parts of creative production area associated with social protocols. These were based on the extension of work production to modes of sociality traditionally associated with leisure-time.

Indeed, creative production avails itself of a working cycle often broken by leisure moments that ameliorate team spirit and focus. Nevertheless, this is also enacted also by facilitating spontaneous and informal interaction between the entire labour force, such as social events or playful satire among employers and employees.12 The case of Facebook constitutes a yardstick against which we can evaluate how this interiorisation – subservient to creative production – copes with corporate organisations. In fact, it asks the question, what has fundamentally changed in corporate organisational culture?

In the General Life Insurance headquarter, spaces for leisure were to recreate the bourgeois lifestyle – seen in material comfort – to increase employees’ satisfaction and reduce staff turnover. Facebook, in its intents as well as in its architectural deployment, relies on one single identity. The case of Facebook is understood as the ultimate instance of a formal shift in corporate headquarters towards a total interiosation.

Indeed, the architectural shift of the creative corporation relies on infrastructural distribution – able to perform social functions – as well as by the increasing inclusion of leisure activities. In parallel, the furniture design progressively started to regulate social exchanges among co-workers. The transformation has exploited the progressive non-standardisation of the working task – facilitated by information technology – catering for different protocols of interaction. The technical convenience of flexibility – understood through the form of the open office plan – provided a rich ground for new architectural tropes to develop. It created a working experience that has been greatly changed, no longer focussed on the individual workstation. The regulation of informal meeting and impromptu interaction has changed the office space to what can be understood as a multi-scalar, controlled, environment.

22

Introduction : toward corporateville

11

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude ; for an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York : Semiotext(e), 2004) p 56

12

One clear case is represented by the playful ‘culture of fun’ of Google working culture. See Eric Schimidt and Johnathan Rosemberg, How Google Works (John Murray : London, 2014).

Burolandschaft GEG Versand Headquarter Kamen 1963-1964

Central Beheer Headquarter Apeldoorn 1967

Willis and Dumas HQ Ipswich 1971

Cisco Meraki Headquarter San Francisco 2013

New Facebook Headquarter Menlo Park 2015

Burolandschaft GEG Versand Headquarter Kamen 1963-1964

Central Beheer Headquarter Apeldoorn 1967

Willis and Dumas HQ Ipswich 1971

Cisco Meraki Headquarter San Francisco 2013

New Facebook Headquarter Menlo Park 2015

Diagram showing the shift of social protocols from distribution to furniture arrangement.

Introduction: toward corporateville

23

As a result, the project intends to challenge this infiltration of working protocols in every aspect of employees’ lives that sees leisure as a tool to foster not only sociality but also collaboration. The project embraces the new working condition – that entails private habits – by re-thinking the workspace around the formation of protocols that regards both living and working. To this end, the dissertation sees the village as a typology through which the design can operate the transformation. The research will explore how its architectural reinterpretation in the context of the territorial re-organisation of leisure time operated after the Second World War. The village became paradigmatic of constructing a collective subject. In fact, Leisure time became the object of State’s rationale to consolidate unique identity. In 1936, the French state bestowed to the population paid vacation to facilitate the circulation of people within the National boundaries. In so doing, it promoted National uniformity conferring to the labour force – at least in theory – the same life-condition that the old bourgeois establishment held. Therefore, in its egalitarian diffusion, leisure became a symbol of liberty and abolition of classes. The liberty of displacement proffered to the population by the technological advance of transportation – not least short haul flights – linked the expansion of tourism to the geopolitical exploitation of the French colonies. The latter as well as the Mediterranean coast embodied the perfect scenario to establish a cohesive identity within the vacationers. In this context, the French touristic villages of Club Méditerranée enacted a form of pre-industrial society in which restraints and social distances were abolished. It culminated in being a tool for creating a collective ethos through social exchanges leveraged to their most materialistic form: sexuality and cult of the body. Therefore, the dissertation identifies its spatial agencies as design operatives. In parallel, the study will take into account the work of the architect George Candilis. He singled out specific architectural components in the re-appraisal of the village. The latter was understood as a form of reconciliation of the domestic with the social sphere as well as an opportunity for restructuring the post-war social realm in its moral attitude.

On the left. Fig.06 Club Meditérranée village in Corfu, Greece, 1960.

On the right. Fig.07 Club Meditérranée village in Corfu, the unrestrained distribution between the huts.

24

Introduction : toward corporateville

Considering the productive sociality in creative industries and its dependency on the collective. Considering the renewed corporate imaginary tailored around the idea of productive community.

How to re-think the tech corporate workspace through the paradigm of the village configuring a shared and productive live-work condition?

The project takes on the new working culture in the context of Silicon Valley. In fact, leisure spaces gradually emerged in the Valley as actual institutions and active part of the economy. The natural amenities of the area have become the backdrop for meetings. The Valley with its year-round balmy weather and abundance of quiet streets and hiking trails is conducive to walking meetings.

This work stresses the characterisation of a shared lifestyle as conducive for successful business meetings. As underpinned by the sociologists Mark Granovetter the meeting culture is strictly related to the concept of trust among the actors. The latter is enabled by ‘weak ties’ grounded in interpersonal relations, not ‘under-socialised or oversocialised’.13 Both ‘working and non-working settings […] form the bonds through which human beings learn to cooperate’.14 In consonance with Granovetter, the sociologists Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields claim that the economy of the Valley stems from a social network based on those ‘weak ties’. Ultimately, they point out that this can be seen as a model for innovation and economic development. Thus, the research highlights the productive relevance of leisure spaces in the suburban context of Silicon Valley. However, the current suburban condition of the Valley has still loose functions. It is a mere overlapping of work and live areas. Whereas the process of corporate decentralisation draw the suburban – understood as a place of pastoral life away from the congestion of the city – to a close, it did not lead to an interconnection of life and work. Indeed, as stated by the urban planner Robert Fishman in 1987, the effect of suburban sprawl led to what he termed ‘technoburb’ – peripheral zone that

13

Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields, ‘Social Capital and Capital Gains’, in Understanding Silicon Valley : The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Redwood City, CA : Standford University Press, 2000) p.202

14

Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields, ‘Social Capital and Capital Gains’ p.202

On th left. Fig. 08 Inaccessible staircase of the new Facebook campus. Photo taken by me on 10 August 2016.

On the right. Fig. 09 One of the suburban single family dwelling in overlooking the Campus. Photo taken by me on 10 August 2016.

Introduction: toward corporateville

25

has emerged as a viable socioeconomic unit. The archetypal technoburb is seen in Silicon Valley where ‘advanced communication technology […] superseded the faceto-face contact of the traditional city [generating] urban diversity without traditional urban concentration.’15 As evidence, this suburban condition remains unquestioned although, nowadays, production – both in the corporate scale and in the territorial scale – relies on the programmatic variety and interconnection typical of the traditional city. This condition lays the ground on which one can re-think a productive suburban through the typology of the village.

How does the corporate village create a new suburban condition with urban characteristics – understood in the interrelation of living and working?

Thus, the study appraises specific components of the village as the drive for design.

The village is seen as a typology through which one can challenge this multiscalar condition in the suburban context of Silicon Valley.

Menlo Park district, Silicon Valley, California. In black the Facebook estate.

26

Introduction : toward corporateville

15

Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias : the Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York : Basic Books, 1987) p 184

Chapter 1

State’s instrumentalisation of leisure

On November 27, 1933, the German Labour Front leader Robert Ley announced the foundation of ‘Strength Through Joy’. This was to develop leisure programmes to promote of National Socialism and boost the internal economy by encouraging domestic tourism. Nevertheless, the mission began with transforming ‘workplaces from sites of class conflict to ‘plant communities’’.2 To this end, the organisation aimed at connecting the ‘after work’ to the workday itself in the closest way possible. It aimed to make visible the ‘ideal value’ of work over and above the mere ‘material’ or ‘technical-mechanical’.3 By planning the reconciliation of free time and working time, the value of work as such would have been re-affirmed. The German Labour Front, intended to transform work into a vocation based on ‘performance and achievement’ rather than possession. The latter was deemed not to be effective on the individual aspirations.

Labour Front and Kraft Durch Freude believed that the shop floor served as the primary site of class conflict. By improving the condition of the workspace, Strength Through Joy aimed at increasing the loyalty among workers to their class and the nation. Thus, one of the first points addressed was the aesthetics of the factory. The conversion of the shop floor involved physical improvements such as plants and sports fields as well as staging art exhibits and concerts as respites during the workday. The aesthetics were to infuse work with moral value and elevate workers to the status of ‘creators’ whose products had moral integrity.4 The inclusion of leisure – and its aesthetics – was to honour labour and eradicate the conflict between employers and employees by mitigating estrangement. Therefore, well-kept grounds complete with flowers and generous green spaces, good lighting, clean and modern changing rooms, civilised dining rooms facilitated conversation and promote ‘a degree of personal and collective well-being that the hungering after material goods could not satisfy’.5 Sharing leisure without any discrimination within the entire labour’s fabric such as workers, shopkeepers, white-collar workers and others, was to create a firm National social body. The once common practice of separating workers and salaried employees was eliminated in the name of a classless ‘community’. Indeed, crucial for the factory design came to be the lunchroom. The aestheticisation of the workplace led to the attention to details. Worker dined in simply furnished and tasteful canteens with window boxes and flowers on each table, the silverware and glass were designed according to SdA standards for its aesthetic appeal.6 Aesthetics was subservient to create an infusion of German culture that would validate the idea of ‘creativity’ embedded in industrial production. To this end, the organisation Beauty of Labour concluded an agreement with the Reich Chamber for Visal Arts, which enabled employers to hire artists and craftsmen to painting murals, design office furniture, and contribute to on-site art exhibits where they could sell their work, and where workers could gain an appreciation for aesthetics during their breaks. Evidently, the aim was to elevate the cultural awareness of the workers and thus to harmonise the interest among leaders and workforce.7

30

Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

1

Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy : Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007) p 40

2

Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy p 40

3

Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy p 79

4

Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy p 83

5

Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy p 83

6

In this regard, The Beauty of Labor’s periodical, Schonheit der Arbeit, equated the creativity of the artists who displayed their work on the shop floor with that of employees, who decorated the ‘community rooms’ of their plants. Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy p 87

Top. Fig. 10 The typical shop floor, according to the Beauty of Labor. The model reflects the Beauty of Labour’s belief that space, light and cleanliness would improve worker morale and efficiency.

Bottom. Fig. 11 The communal kitchen. Civilised dining renforced the ‘honour’ accorded to labor.

Chapter 1 : State’s intrumentalisation of leisure

31

Fig. 12 From elite to mass tourism.

Taken from a photographic survey of changing tourism by George Candilis 1973

Chapter 1

Mass tourism, the French case

Do not talk about your work. Tell me how you spent your vacation and I will tell you who you are.1 Despite the convergences between the French aspiration for popular tourism and the Fascist and National Socialist model in terms of political agenda2, they had different premises. According to KdF literature, the Popular Front programme envisaged the artificial distinction between work and leisure, feeding only personal enjoyment without regard for its value as spiritual edification and physical relaxation.3 Conversely, Strength Through Joy cultivated the whole person starting with the workplace where the ethical meaning of work took shape. The increased productivity would have arisen from the ‘joy’ of character enriching cultural pursuit within a healthy work environment. What KdF understood was that – by creating a division between work and leisure – the French Popular Front was laying the basis on which a profound idealisation of leisure time will have built up by the late 60s. Accordingly, a broad restructuring of the social fabric came to be represented by the new organisation of habits carried out on vacation. With the French law of June 20, 1936, drawn up by The Popular Front in alliance with the left-wing movements on congrés payés (paid vacation), vacation became a political right. This obligatory legislation provided a 15-day-paid vacation for all salaried employees or wage earns. Rather than only a bourgeois class privilege, as it was ever since, vacation became an expression of rights for the working class. Suddenly, the working class, the people employed in manual labour in factories, could afford some of the destination promoted by the government through subsidy.

Indeed, elitism and rigidity of French tourism were still present in the 40s. The working class was not only an impoverished group but also not accustomed to the new rhythm that vacation would provide. As late as 1940, going on vacation continued to signify a bourgeois lifestyle. Thus, during vacation, people often stayed at home, caught up on domestic tasks or engaging in older patterns of working-class leisure.

Perhaps, staying with relatives in the countryside, camping, or sometimes take advantage of the new popular tourism association.4 To this end, the state encouraged the development of mass tourism and widened the social access (domestic and foreign) through mixed economy of market and state initiatives.5 By the late 1960s, with the advent of consumer society the idea of free time, following the thought of sociologist Theodor Adorno, stood against the one of employment.6 The disapproval against the bourgeois, which was incubating in the population, had been institutionalised.

For instance, Adorno stresses the activity of camping as a ‘protest against the tedium and convention of bourgeois life’7 that later became fully exploited by the camping industry. A new democratic ideology suddenly arose from mass consumerism, that ‘everyone was equal in the sight of things’.8 Again, as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed, people on vacation were ‘being transformed into absolute unilateral consumers’.9 Indeed, vacation came to be understood no longer as mere restoration from work rather it entailed the very moment of psychological (re) discovery of the ‘true’ self aside from the conventions of the realm of labour. The set of norms of the everyday life become subverted in holiday advertisements. A set of images were associated with vacation time such as the sun or the contact with

34

Chapter 1 : Leisure as collective form

1

Michael Cjadefaud, Aux Origines du Tourisme dans les Pays de l’Adour (Pau : Université de Pau, 1987) p 976 2

According to them, the common aims were strengthening familial and national unity, regenerating of the body by returning to and reconciliation with nature and by giving an understanding of the geographical boundaries of the nation. Jean-Claude and Léon Strauss, ‘Un Temps Noveau pour les Ouvries: les Congés Payés, 1930-1960’, pp 386-93 in L’Avenement des Loisirs, 1850-1960, ed. Alan Corbin (Paris, 1995).

3

Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy : Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007) p 43 4

People awakened at their regular time, as if they were going to work, and ‘it took lots of effort to persuade them that for 12 days they could wake up when they wanted.’

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.2 (1998), 247–286, p 258.

5

In 1948, the non-profit organisation Tourism and Travail received a state subvention of around 12 milions francs. Paid vacation, along with other social policies – subsidisation of education, public day-care (and nurseries) for children, health insurance, housing, transportation, pensions, entertainment and cultural activities were benefits geared toward supporting the right of all social groups to share in general welfare and prosperity of society.

Avermaete, Tom, ‘Leisure Culture : Travelling Notions of Public and Private’, in Another Modern : the Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-JosicWoods (Rotterdam : NAi Publishers, 2005) p 343

Clockwise. Fig. 13 Advertisement of the French landscape amenities. Cote d’Azur poster. Fig. 14 Paid vacation as right to all, 1950. Fig 15 Tourisme and Travail advertisement, catalogue1953. Fig. 16 Tourisme and Travail advertisement , catalogue 1975.

Mass tourism, the French case

35

nature emphasising the youth and beauty. By the 1960s several images dominated those used to represent vacation: the family holiday - a couple with two or three children; the romantic holiday – a heterosexual couple gazing into the sunset; and the fun holiday – same-sex groups looking for partners of the other sex.10 Nevertheless, the increasing dissemination of the most important post-war consumer good, the automobile, brought forth the possibility of the arrangement of consumer lifestyle represented by these advertisements. Following Kristin Ross ‘the France-at-the-wheel enacted a revolution in attitudes toward mobility and displacement’.11 It meant that domestic tourism reversed the logic of the circulation and distribution of consumer goods. Besides, in tourism, the consumer travelled to the commodity, rather than the commodity being circulated and distributed to the consumers.12 The aim to transform French mountains, seacoasts, and rural areas into ‘tourist products’ became possible.13 Due to the expansion of cheap air travel, even international landscape could become a commodity. It signified a mythic escape, personal autonomy and deracination from time and space.14 Thus, the tourism project came to be understood as a crucial factor for the restructuring of the ‘New France’ and the New French subject. At this point, the aforementioned commercial images could be played out in closed context.

De facto, decentralisation of the architecture of leisure stood for geopolitical and sociological reorganisation. The recreation of confined environments – the villages – could deal with the advantage of geographical position – amenities of the landscape – without having the disadvantage of physical dispersion. The images of advertisements became thus signs of a homogeneous society reproduced at a smaller scale.

Nevertheless, vacation – and in general, the concept of leisure time – shifted from an idea of public care and benefit bestowed by the State as right toward a moment of constructing the self through consumerist objects. The social consumption envisaged by the State’s benefits were grounded on the idea of exchange where the productivity of Nation was attached to the well-being of the population. On the contrary, mass consumption constructed subjects according to lifestyles not only embodied by objects but also incubated by the spatial and programmatic qualities of the post-war touristic village.

6

Theodor, Adorno, Culture Industry : Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London ; New York : Routledge, 2001) p 194 7

Theodor, Adorno, Culture Industry p 190 8

Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England : Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford : Standford University Press, 1990) p 60 9

Jean-Francis Held, ‘Claude Levi-Strauss: Tristes Vacances’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 74 (April 1966) p 29 10

John Urry, The Tourist Gaze : Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, 2nd ed (London : SAGE, 2002) pp 145-152

11

Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies : Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 1995) p 22

12

Arguing the point of the sociologist Jozsef Borocz , Ellen Furlough makes explicit the mechanism.

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.2 (1998), 247–286, p 263

13

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations’ p 261

14

Ross’s book provides several examples on how cinema industry has fed the myth.

Postwar French movies reinforced the myth car entailing the concept of personal freedom through ownership. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies p 22-54

Fig. 17 From elite to mass tourism. The ‘France-at-the-wheel’ described by Kristin Ross.

Taken from a photographic survey of changing tourism by George Candilis 1973

36

Chapter 1 : Leisure as collective form

French population on vacation

Number of villages in France 550

100%

500

90%

450

80%

400

70%

350

60%

300

50%

250

40%

200

30%

150

20%

100

10%

50

‘30s

‘40s

‘50s

‘60s

‘70s

‘80s

185.000

112.000

66.000

n°of beds 32.000

‘65s

‘70s

‘75s

‘80s

Top. Development of domestic tourism. Source: Furlough, Ellen, ‘Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.2 (1998), 247–286 Bottom. Fig. 18 Map of the development of mass tourism in Languedoc-Roussillion, Southern france.

Mass tourism, the French case

37

Hamburg Berlin

Hannover

Warsaw

London Dusseldorf Frankfurt PARIS

Air France short-haul flights across Mediterrean area 1966

DINARD

Prague STRASBOURG

DEAUVILLE

MULHOUSE

French Empire 1959 LA BAULE

Zurich

NANTES

Vienna

Munich

LYON

Venice

GENEVA

Milan BORDEAUX NICE

TOULOUSE

MARSEILLE

BASTIA

AJACCIO

Rome

Istanbul

Milan Madrid Lisbon Athens Algeri

Rabat Casablanca

Cairo

Dakar

Abidjan Douala

Fig.19, Club MĂŠditerranĂŠe village of Palilnuro 1960 Studied by the sociologist Henry Raimond in its spatial and programmatic instances.

In this context, the village played a crucial role.

The research will explore how its architectural reinterpretation became paradigmatic of constructing a collective subject. In the first instance, the village was instrumentalised as a form of pre-industrial society in which restraints and social distances were abolished. It culminated in being a tool – representation aside – for creating a collective ethos through social exchanges leveraged to their most materialistic form: sexuality and cult of the body.

Secondly, the study will take into account the oeuvre of the architect George Candilis.On the contrary, he aimed at subverting the logic of privatisation deriving from the growing consumer society.

Thus, he singled out specific architectural components in the re-appraisal of the village.

The latter was understood as a form of reconciliation of the domestic with the social sphere as well as an opportunity for restructuring the postwar social realm in its moral attitude.

Chapter 1

Village as collective form

One of the most important examples of the confluence of ideology within commerce is the French villages of Club Mediterranée – initially a non-for-profit organisation. The villages were intended to represent the ideals of its founders Gérard Blitz, who was an egalitarian, sensual person, attracted to yoga, Buddhism, and a relaxed management style.1 At the beginning, the makeshift environment was constituted by U.S. army surplus tents and allied army cots. As the army surplus tents began wearing out, they were replaced by Polynesian huts, and the costume of choice at Club Med villages became the flowered Tahitian sarong.

Worn by both women and men, and by staff, the sarong signified the ‘liberated’ body and nativism. The clothing represented not only a rupture with the daily life but also a representation of horizontal hierarchies. Put another way, the belonging to a group of workers – clerical staff, cadres, doctor – is no longer imposed – and even represented by clothing – and thus membership can be practicable and practised in the whole group. 2 In this regard, Le Monde journalist Alain Faujas says regarding the Gentile Organisateurs that ‘they ate, played, danced and slept with’ the Gentile Members – the holiday-makers. On the other hand, comfort was often replaced by improvised accommodations as a representation of egalitarian condition among the members – either vacationers or organisers. The comfort represented bourgeois establishment and, as such, was replaced by showers without hot water; minimal sanitary facilities; and unsteady pine tables doubled as shelters when it rained.

On the left. Fig. 20 Club Méditerranée in Corfu, showers.

On the right. Fig. 21 Club Méditerranée in Corfu, playful event.

42

Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

1

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.2 (1998), 247–286, p 278

2

Henry Raymond, ‘L’Utopie Concrète : Recherches sur un Village de Vacances’, Revue Francaise de Sociologie, 1 (JulySeptember 1960), 336

Comfort was denied to all – vacationers and personnel alike – in the Club Med village at Corfu in the 1950s. Indeed, the ‘gentile organisers’ and the ‘gentile members’ had the same type of accommodation – the hut – not far from each other. The accommodations were sorted by singles and couples and later a cabin for three people was introduced, so it was not too difficult to recognise who had a propensity for sex or not. Moreover, the males had to pass by the female area to reach the showers – at least during the evening – whereas couples had their service area. Hence, the unrestrained distribution along with the relocation of services became a device apt to foster social interaction. In this case, it lured the members to cross the boundaries of each other’s private realm. In fact, as Ellen Furlough has pointed out ‘the sexuality valorized at Club Med was predominately heterosexual, casual, spontaneous and blurred the edges of definition of propriety’.3 In some cases, the members spontaneously instituted conventions. For instance, in Tahiti when a towel was folded over the outside door meant ‘do not disturb’.4 Thus, displaying a moment of intimacy to the entire village was not considered ridiculous at all. The trespass of the individual realm was taken for granted laying the groundwork for a new transitory morality.

3

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Packaging Pleasure: Club Méditerranée and French Consumer Culture, 1950-1968’, French Historical Studies, 18.1 (1993), 65-81, p 73

4

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Packaging Pleasure’ p 73

However, Corfu village was enclosed in one loop that served the main functions such as the bar and the dance floor area, the principal beach and the sports area. The latter unfolded in two further loops – around the female and the male area – that culminated into one aisle directed toward the central hut – the bar, the restaurant and

toilet shower

F

M

O

sunbathing

eating, playful events

toilet shower

sport

welcoming

fishing

Functional diagram and path of movement of Club Méditerraée village at Corfú, Greece.

Chapter 1 : The village as collective model

43

5

Women’s area

4

Couples area

Impromptu encounters

1

Men’s area 6

Wellcome area

3

7

1

Toilet blocks

2

Kitchen

3

Office

4

Toilet block

5

Shared showers

6

Restaurant / Bar

7

Dance floor

2

Staff area

Men movement Women movement Staff movement

Couples area

Staff area

1

Toilet blocks Toilet blocks.

2

Kitchen Kitchen.

3

Office Office.

4

Toilet block Toilet block.

5

Shared showers Shared showers.

6

Restaurant / Bar / Restaurant

7

Dance floorfloor.

Dance

Bar

Men movement Men movement Women movement Women movement.

Staff movement Staff movement.

AXO and diagram of programmatic distribution. Club Mediterranée village, Corfú, Greece.

44

Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

Fig. 22-28 Some of the collective activities of Club Méditerranée village in Corfú, 1960.

Chapter 1 : The village as collective model

45

the dance floor. Big spaces were given to sports, such as bowl, volley and tennis, yet the only recognisable centre of activities was where the vacationers daily encountered each other, the central space. A practice of welcoming was institutionalised – in which the vacationers along with the Gentile Organisators greet by giving a kiss to the newcomers, which was played out at the centre of the village.5 The means through which the entire group of vacationers portrayed its habits as autonomous and spontaneous social life is firstly demanded by the action of the GOs. They undertake the playful activity and enable a process of social involvement at the same time.6 The latter is enabled by involving into the activity the vacationers step-by-step. To this end, the village provides spaces in which social life is reorganised around ‘spectacle-arenas’.

In this recognisable areas – physically built or just enlargement in the circulation – the holiday village enacts routines, usually three times a day, in which this spectacle is enacted as a representation of the group. As a consequence, the configuration plays out a spontaneous hierarchy and interaction between the passive spectators and those who occupy the ‘centre’ and set the rules.

The village was fenced. The sociologist Henri Raymond claims that the spatial structure and the rituals of the Club Méditerranée entailed what he called ‘concrete utopia’.7 The village consists of a well-delimited population; the tourists are isolated from the local population or strangers. It encompasses noticeable and quantifiable activities. Ultimately, it is qualified by a relationship with the environment conducted according to easily identifiable waypoints.8 Besides, the sense of membership is reinforced by the nature of activities taking place. While sailing, underwater diving, water skiing cannot be practised without any apprenticeship, volley, ball, ping pong does not imply any strong commitment. Sports in which apprenticeship is required create groups that are rather hierarchical according to the degree of mastery.

While the former tends to create a group grounded in the sense of hierarchy, the latter activities provide for sociality within a sense of equality. 9 Furthermore, Club executives argued another strategy to mutate the external signs of status. In order to have a drink at the bar, for example, people detached some of the coloured beads that they wore around their necks or ankles.10 And in the late villages, the materialism and the consumerist theme of abundance was especially evident regarding food. Food and wine were unlimited and included in the package.11 In consonance with Ellen Furlough, the early club med villages ‘provided an ideal space to act out this new culture, thereby contributing to its formation.’12 In the case of the hut village – by its form and materiality – operated a ‘spectacularisation’ of habits spiced with the image of the primitive ‘rooted in one’s body and sexuality.13 It intended to represent a society abolished by its social exclusion and distinctions devoted to abundance and care of the self. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, this new class would support the ‘end of ideology’ and ‘alleviate class tensions’ through a ‘more equitable distribution of consumer goods and education’.14 However, the dissertation does not intend to stress the nature of the imaginary in itself, or if the vacation experience replicated an ‘authentic’ social habits – as stated by Adorno – or if it was standardised around a particular collective imagination.15 Rather, it does aim at highlighting the formation – or the strengthening – of a shared system of values and rules through which a class felt represented. The village fuelled it by the spatial and programmatic distribution as well as by its confined and dense nature – or regulations such as the exclusion of money exchange. The latter operated the conflation of private habits and public rules instituting its regulation by mutual exchanges routinized in the entire life cycle.

46

Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

5

‘French Village in Greece (1962)’, 13 April 2014, 1:05. Available at https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x9i53dgsuLY [accessed on 11 April 2017].

6

The sociologist Henri Raymond carried out a series of interviews and an analysis of the Club Med village of Palinuro in 1960. The research of Henry Raimond starts from three hypothesis. The first, that the group of leisure constituted by the population of the village should be considered as a society possessing its own structure, its rites and its institutions. Secondly, that there are certain relations between the geographical data of leisure (what constitutes it as migration), the space in which it is performed, and the development of society that manifests itself there.

Thirdly, in this society of leisure, associated with social relations (games, activities), there are certain meanings that can be found in the major press, cinema, radio, television.

The methodology comprised studied on spot interviews during the course of a stay.

Translation mine. Henry Raymond, ‘L’Utopie Concrète : Recherches sur un Village de Vacances’, pp 323-324 7

See Henry Raymond, ‘L’Utopie Concrète : Recherches sur un Village de Vacances’ pp 323-33 8

Henry Raymond, ‘L’Utopie Concrète : Recherches sur un Village de Vacances’, p 325 9

Henry Raymond, ‘L’Utopie Concrète : Recherches sur un Village de Vacances’, p 328 10

Ellen, Furlough, Packaging Pleasure p 70 11

Ellen, Furlough, Packaging Pleasure p 78 12

Ellen, Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations’ p 281

The tourist villages designed by Candilis-Josic-Woods attempted to re-negotiate the private realm and the public. The goal was to create a shared identity through which the public sphere could be reconstructed on vacation. In fact, post-war France was characterised by the emergence of the phenomenon called ‘privatisation’. As reported

by Tom Avermaete, sociologists as Henri Lefebvre and Cornelius Castoriadis were proponents of a striking theoretical reflection according to which the separation of the spheres of domestic life and work life were the reason of a general lack of socialisation of individuals.16 This separation was spatially seen in the decentralisation of the house into the suburban landscape – in French called pavillon – and the consequent spatial distribution of basic functions across the territory, such as living and working.

Working sphere, domestic sphere and bureaucratic State constituted detached institutions of society contributing to reject that public sphere once constructed on

13

As Marianna Torgovnick has argued in Gone Primitive, representations of the “Primitive” can offer “a model of alternative social organization in which psychological integrity is a birth-right, rooted in one’s body and sexuality. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago : University Chicago Press, 1991) p 240 14

Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European Politics’, Daedalus (Winter 1964), 271-303, cited in Ellen, Furlough, ‘Packaging Pleasure’ p 80 15

During the expansion years the reiteration of the all-inclusive formula was injected by the growth in comfort and in customised activities. The last resorts of Club Méditerranée fostered a kind tourism that relied more on a loyalty connected to system of values grounded in monetary and technical distinction. Evidently, while young ‘swinging singles’ were prevalent during the 1960s, from the 1970s the GMs were generally older, wealthier, and more international. Youthful exuberance, amateurism and spontaneity gave away.

Accordingly, the traits of villages changed. They were either dismantled or upgraded with keys for doors, tables for two with greater individualism and privacy. More ‘technical’ sports such as tennis, golf, ski, water skiing, underwater diving, were progressively incorporated and the offer came to be broaden to the greatest extent and started to be tailored around an ideal consumer. Ellen Furlough, ‘Club Méditerranée, 19502002’ in Europe at the Seaside: the Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean , edited

by Luciano Segreto, Carles Manera, Manfred Pohl (New York : Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2009) pp 174-189 16

Tom Avermaete, ‘Leisure Culture : Travelling Notions of Public and Private’, in Another Modern : the Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-JosicWoods (Rotterdam : NAi Publishers, 2005) p 334

Top. Fig.29 View of the village ‘Houses associated with Boats’ at Bacarès-Leucatte, France, by Geoge Candilis.

Bottom. Fig 30 Row dwellings with private entrances and parking of individual transportation.

Chapter 1 : The village as collective model

47

institutions. Indeed, as noted by Avermaete, according to Lefebvre the attachment to the idea of the suburban dwelling stemmed from something specific, the desire of ownership.17 Therefore, the domestic realm assumed the characteristic of a closed individual sphere in which the ‘ownership’ – subsumed by the private house – started to construct a new subject only devoted to consumerist goods.

The partnership saw the village as a paradigm by which recreating the coherent public sphere lost through the process privatisation. To this end, the touristic projects of the firm ratified a new formal paradigm distant from the hotel seen as an exclusive collective entity. The sense of ownership was re-created in vacation by the individual unit understood as a testing ground for variation of the minimal ‘cabin-studio’.18 They were designed to offer the exact answer to the lodging needs of the tourist, but above all creating space of private retreat.

For instance, the ‘bungalow’ and the ‘semi-bungalow’ of the project for the Touristic Equipment in the Tropics envisage individual units connected by infrastructural elements that would supply for social activities. In all projects presented, the distribution and the relation between the units and the shared spaces were designed to create niches of semi-public spaces in which the different strata of customers could encounter. This common feature operates as a leitmotif in the structural organisation of the village. The units of Belleville resort offers a design solution apt to negotiate the private and the public on demand. The main façade of the tourist cell – in front of the terrace – was a large pivoting wall that could secure a temporary semi-private space breaking the continuity of the terrace. At the same time, the latter constituted an infrastructural system that aimed at connecting through a degree of privacy the cells. Following Avermaete, Candilis-Josic-Woods reduced the village to the smallest composing entities – the cell understood as new dwelling ideal of privatisation – and reconnected them into an urban figure. The latter was always conceived concerning the possibility of negotiation between the private and the public. However, this urban reconfiguration came to reinforce a sense of ownership in the Houses associated with Boats at Bacarès-Leucatte. The dwellings were seamlessly connected with the circulatory systems of cars (roads) and of sailing boats (channels). Therefore, the sense of mythic escape as well as personal autonomy – driven by the personal transportation and the private access respectively – was interjected in the settlement and directly combined with the private dwelling. In this instance, I argue, the personal autonomy is reinforced by the promiscuity of the distribution resulted in fostering not only sociality but also a subjectivity related to the consumerist object – car and boat. The village established a ‘figure of collectivity’19 in which the family, neighbourhood and town were no longer mediators between individuals. As a result, the mediator was de facto superseded by the infrastructure – stem – that through mobility catered to social interaction apt to fulfil and re-structure the new needs of the emergent society.

Moreover, the stem – understood as a system that ‘accept the diversification and its spontaneous nature of there [leisure] facilities, while at the same time ensuring unity to the whole’20 – consolidated its time dimension outside the social entities kept out.

48

Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

17

Tom Avermaete, ‘Leisure Culture : Travelling Notions of Public and Private’ p 335 18

Definited by ‘minimalist but sufficient in the dwelling space it proposes, undone of all superfluous luxury or unnecessary decoration’. Tom Avermaete, ‘Leisure Culture : Travelling Notions of Public and Private’ p 347

19

Tom Avermaete, ‘Leisure Culture : Travelling Notions of Public and Private’ p 363

20

Georges Candilis, Planning and Design for Leisure (Stuttgart : Karl Kramer, 1972) p 113

Type A Type B

Type D4

Type D1

Type C Type D2

Type D3

0

50

Top. Fig.29 Plan of Port Leucate, Bacares-Leucatte, France, 1969.

Bottom. Fig 30 Diagram of the infrastructural system constructed around the interconnection between the circulation and the niches. Port Leucate, Bacares-Leucatte, France, 1969.

Chapter 1 : The village as collective model

49

Type A - Courtyard

Type B - L cluster

0

50

Type C - Cube

10

Type D - Ribbon house cluster 1

Type D - Ribbon house cluster 2

Type D - Ribbon house cluster 3

Type D - Ribbon house cluster 4

Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

On the left page. Niches in the touristic units.

Above. Outside the niches. Port Leucate, Bacares-Leucatte, France, 1969.

Chapter 2

Leisure-based working culture

The working culture that characterises the Information Technology industry is clearly reflected in the business context that makes Silicon Valley prosper. The latter is mainly compounded by two main interlinked economic factors. Corporate firms and non-profit research universities that compete with the formation of the spinoff. And, venture capitalists that care about growing new companies so as to resell them with huge incomes within few years. Due to the high turnover of the employees from one firm to another, the region has continuously generated new start-ups and innovative firms. Therefore, Silicon Valley has to be seen not only as a cluster of Information and Communication Technologies industries that strive to overcome one other but as a collaborative community in which social boundaries between economic actors – which constitute the factors of its external economy – tie the production process together. In this context, the overused term ‘social capital’ assumes particular connotations and, quoting the sociologists Cohen and Fields, ‘it does not regard civic engagement’.1 Since the region is open to outsiders, the indispensable trust to make business agreements here develops rather quickly, because the concept of social gains is widely intended as an economic opportunity. For the interlaced system of private and public institutions to be effective, how and where the agreements are negotiated is crucial. Therefore, the informal interaction between the start-ups and entrepreneurs who seek investors is important. In fact, leisure spaces gradually emerged in the Valley as actual institutions and active part of the economy.

For instance, Coupa Cafe near Standford University in Palo Alto, California has proven to house many tests of products on the part of start-ups. Perhaps, the customer service tool ‘Talkbin’ was tested in the restaurant and after acquired by Google in April 2011. Along with that one, Coupa Cafe has facilitated the development of more

On the left. Fig. 31 Buck’s restaurant interior On the right. Fig. 32 Coupa Cafe interior

54

Chapter 2 : The leisure workscape

1

Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields, ‘Social Capital and Capital Gains’, in Understanding Silicon Valley : The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Redwood City, CA : Standford University Press, 2000) p.216 2

Tomio Geron, ‘Coupa Café : Where Startups Meet, Work And Test Products’, Forbes, 16 November 2011.

Available at < https:// www.forbes.com/sites/ tomiogeron/2011/11/16/ coupa-cafe-where-startupsmeet-work-and-testproducts/#52992306e6f2> [accessed on 5 March 2017]

than 40 startups. The popularity of the place among the tech entrepreneurs of the area is not only because it caters the customers to 50 megabit WiFi and comfortable seats. Due to the proximity to Standford, it became rapidly a meeting point of Venture Capitalists and usually young people that wanted to ‘be seen’ by someone that can invest in their ideas.2 On this subject, the journalist and Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Debora P. Piscione largely discussed it.3 The Dutch Goose opened its doors in 1966 and became a ‘favoured gathering place for venture capitalists, Standford students, and even Little Leaguers’. In the Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside Road, San Mateo County was the most important deals in internet history were launched such as Netscape and Hotmail. It is a ‘world-renowned institution. […] On any given day, you can catch some of the most recognizable faces in venture capital and entrepreneurship’.4

3

She traces the place in which some of important agreement were made by venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs. She based her research on articles and interviews of investors that launch start-ups in the area.

Deborah P. Piscione, Secrets of Silicon Valley : What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World (New York : Palgrave Macmillian, 2013) pp. 153-166 4

Deborah P. Piscione, Secrets of Silicon Valley p 154

Coupa Cafe The Dutch Goose pub Buck’s restaurant The Dish park

Leisure places of Silicon Valley in which business agreements took place.

Leisure based working culture

55

The natural amenities of the area have become the backdrop for meetings. The Valley with its year-round balmy weather and abundance of quiet leafy streets and hiking trails is conducive to walking meetings. Among the many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who conduct regular walk-and-talks are Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter Inc. and Heidi Roizen, operating partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In fact, the Dish area – a 3.5-mile loop of daunting hills and located in Standford foothills – is known as one of the best places in which practice walking meetings. In this regard, the venture capitalist Fern Mandelbaum has claimed that often conducts a business meeting during her hikes.5 The reason has to be seen in the confidential relationship that the ‘changing dynamics of how people are used to conducting business’ [establishes, in fact] entrepreneurs will open up about everything, from their family life or how they like to spend their time outside of work’.6 Therefore, personal life is something comes to be critical in

Top. Fig. 33 Jeff Weiner ,CEO of LinkedIn, and Jack Dorsey co-founder of Twitter during hiking meeting Bottom. Fig. 34 Mark Zuckerberg in a walking meeting in the New Facebook headquarters

56

Chapter 2 : The leisure workscape

5

Deborah P. Piscione, Secrets of Silicon Valley p 167 6

Deborah P. Piscione, Secrets of Silicon Valley p 168

Housework Food preparation and cleanup Lawn and garden care Household management

Caring for and helping household children Caring for and helping household adults

Participating in sports, exercise, and recreation based in Silicon Valley. The

Organisational, civic, and religious activities workday 11

12

workweek

Educational activities

13

Mo

14

10

Tu

15

9

7

We

17

Su

8

16

6

18

5

19 Th

Sa

4

20

3

2

24

1

LEISURE

23

PERSONAL CARE

22

PAID WORK OR STUDY

Fr

UN-PAID WORK

21

OECD classification time-use (2006)

services of the Irish Qualitative Data Archive 8 business. Moreover, as Purchasing stated bygood the and Manager The study set out to quantify Aileen O’Carrol, the new Household working activities habits is also characterised by unpredictability7. and qualify this unpredictable The latter is seen the shifting of the ‘boundaries between the times of work and other margin of working time by Caring for and helping directly interviewing European Working and work-related activities times of life’.8 The report household has shown that software workers had a wider variation members Information Technology workers – especially in starting and finishing times than in clock-based workplaces. In order to face and Working the Ireland case – and regulate the unprecedented unpredictable mode of production – typical of creative interpolating these data with industries – the Information Technology Management – ceased to offer a better salary other International timeuse surveys – Indian, Israel, Working and work-related for long hours and started increasing the working condition in the workspace and Australian and American. providing flexible hours to the activities employees. Thus, the working time for the Information Aileen O’Carrol, Working Time, Knowledge Work Technology worker is extended to a continuous working week interfered by leisure Sleeping and Post-Industrial Society : Unpredictable Work (London : time throughout the day and in a week time. O’Carrol stresses another important Grooming dressing, Palgrave(bathing, Macmillan, 2015) haircut) aspect. The provision of flexible hours Aileen O’Carrol, Working Personal care is often followed by the expectancy on the partSocialising and communicating Time, Knowledge Work and of the company to work long hours.9 As she reports, in agreement with the American Health related self-care Post-Industrial Society p 128 Eating sociologist Arlie Hochschild, in and USdrinking High Tech Industries ‘the time a worker works in 9 of itself, has to count as much as the results accomplished within that time. Time is a reported by the researcher, symbol of commitment’.10 Therefore, what emerges is that total flexibility of working As the ‘sociologist Leslie Perlow (1997b) found similar loyalty time contributes to the configuration of working ethos saw in the quantity of time Watching television deals operating when she spent.

Leisure and sports interviewed software engineers majority of those she talked to did not work long hours. She argues that by opting out of the long hours culture, these employees are working against their companies’ temporal culture […] The company equated working long hours with commitment to the activities Religious and spiritual company. Ability to achieve Volunteering results in a more efficient manner was not rated as Civic obbligation highly as willingness to stay on site. Visibility is seen to be a measure of productivity’ Aileen O’Carrol, Working Time, Knowledge Work and Post-Industrial Society p 74 10 Attending class

Arlie Hochschild, The Homework and research AVERAGE PERCENT ENGAGED IN THE ACTIVITY PER DAY Weekdays

Weekend and holidays

AVERAGE TIME PER PERSON WHO ENGAGE THE ACTIVITY Weekdays

Weekend and holidays

53.1%

22.1%

8.42 h

5.80 h

51.0%

21.1%

7.93 h

5.55 h

0.49 h

0.25 h

Time Bind. When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York : Metropolitan Books, 1997) p 69

work-related activities: ‘include activities that are not obviously work but are done as part of one's job, such as having a business lunch and playing golf with clients.’

Top. The unpredictable timing of the IT worker. There is no exact start or end of the working schedule.

Bottom. Definition of work-related activities and its quantification in the American Time Use Survey released in 2015

Leisure based working culture

57

Even movement plays out the changing dynamics in business meetings above said.

Indeed, according to Margaret Talev and Carol Hymowitz, ‘Facebook’s Zuckerberg caught some of his walking bug from Steve Jobs’. The two, took a stroll in Palo Alto, California in 2010 when Jobs was interested in having Ping. Thereafter, the CEO Mark Zuckerberg usually takes people he wants to hire on a walk near the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.11 As reported by the online journal The Huffington Post, at LinkedIn one way to have a meeting is while walking around the headquarters in Mountain View, California.12 On the other hand, meetings are broken and interlinked with activity normally associated with leisure time. As evidence, Dublin-based online betting platform Bragbet, the Australian-funded graphic design start-up 99designs and the online media and marketing company Neutron Interactive display conference table doubles as ping-pong arena by which to break the meeting occasionally.

However, the former Senior Vice President of Products at Google Jonathan Rosemberg has explained what lies behind the ‘leisurification’ of work according to Google. Google corporation intends to promote a strong ethos of fun in the belief that laughing and joking would prompt the workers to establish bonds that in turn will foster enjoyment. 13 Specifically, Google does not simply create corporate events, but it sets out to create an environment of freedom of choice.14 The latter is played out by the large supply of amenities such as volleyball courts, bowling alleys, climbing walls and slides, gyms with personal trainers and lap pools, colourful bikes to get from building to building, free gourmet cafeterias, and numerous kitchen stocked with all sorts of snacks, drinks, and top-of-the-line espresso machines. Yet, a ‘culture of fun’ is fostered among the employees by pushing to break the boundaries of formal interaction not only between themselves but also with their chiefs through playful satire.15

11

See Margaret Talev and Carol Hymowitz, ‘Zuckerberg, Obama Channel Jobs in Search for Alone Time’, Bloomberg 30 April 2014, available at <https://www. bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2014-04-30/walkingis-the-new-sitting-for-decisionmakers> [accessed on 4 April 2017]

12

Emily Peck, ‘Why Walking Meetings Can Be Better than Sitting Meetings’, The Huffington Post, 9 April 2015 available at < http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2015/04/09/walkingmeetings-at-linke_n_7035258. html> [accessed on 21 January 2017] 13

Eric Schimidt and Johnathan Rosemberg, How Google Works (John Murray : London, 2014) p 55 14

Eric Schimidt and Johnathan Rosemberg, How Google Works pp. 55-56

15

In October 2010, a couple of Google engineers named Colin McMilen and Jonathan Feinberg lauched an internal site called Memegen, which lets Googlers create memes – pithy captions matched to images – and vote on each other’s creations. Memegen created a new way for Googlers to have fun while commenting acerbically on the state of the company.

Eric Schimidt and Johnathan Rosemberg, How Google Works p 57

Fig. 35 Meeting at Neutro Interactive tech corporation, Salt Lake City, Utah

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Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

Evidently, the new working culture relies on the breach of individual privacy to ensure a constant level of trust that goes beyond production as such. On the one hand, it partially depends on informal engagement. On the other hand, it characterises a lifestyle through which the corporation – understood as the whole employees and employers fabric – recognise itself as collective. It prevents the institution of codes hierarchies within the organisational structure and thus facilitates trust across the ranks. According to the sociologist Robert Putnam, trust is seen as a business linchpin that relies on the deep social ties.16 Nonetheless, while Putnam underpins the agency of trust in its historical development – built upon local culture and economic relationships – the sociologists Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields stress the differences in the case of Silicon Valley.

To illustrate the condition of the Valley, they re-read Putnam’s view by relying on the contribution of the American sociologist Mark Granovetter. He insists that trust stems from interpersonal relations that avoid the ‘extreme of both under-socialized (marketoriented, rational choice) and over-socialised (legal institutional) views of human action’.17 They continue, ‘for Granovetter, social relation developing in both work and non-work settings, and the process by which relationships become embedded over time, form the bonds through which human beings learn to cooperate.’18 Thus, the duo questions the validity of the deep social ties out coming by historical proposing a more adaptive model in which ‘weak ties’ are the drives for trust.

16

On this subject, he stresses the idea of civic engagement in local economies seen as facilitator of politic, business and exchange. Those small communities not only generate information transmission, but they also reinforce trust by sanctioning its breaking.

According to Putnam, the trust is generated by the historical summation of a local network of exchanges that propels the development of communities.

See Robert D. Putnam, Make Democracy Work : Civic Tradition in Modern Italy (New Jersey : Priceton University Press, 1993).

17

Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields, ‘Social Capital and Capital Gains’, in Understanding Silicon Valley p.202 18

In the context of Silicon Valley, the informal protocols entailed in leisure settings are understood as a component of economic development. Thus, the project addresses leisure spaces hosting business meetings as a multiscalar issue. Both the region and the IT corporations see in leisure and informal spaces a drive for production and development. Thus, the design challenges this condition by providing spaces apt to cater to entrepreneurs as well venture capitalists for different modes of meeting.

Stephen S. Cohen and Gary Fields, ‘Social Capital and Capital Gains’, in Understanding Silicon Valley p.202

Fig. 36 playful satire at Google headquarter. The man on the right is the former CEO of Google Erich Schmidt.

Chapter 1 : State’s intrumentalisation of leisure

59

Fig.37, Philip Morris Research Center Tower, Ulrich Franzen, Richmond, VA, 1972 Gelatin Silver Print.

Chapter 2

From static to movement

One critical aspect of the shift in the office design was the Taylorist managerial idea of “minimum-task breakdown” that was based on dividing the job as a whole into individual units. In this method, analysis and execution were clearly divided moments of production and demanded to the manager and the clerk respectively. The workspace of clerical staff still embedded the idea of Taylorist production.1 Indeed, as late as the 1930s the image of the assembly line was a reference for a working ethic that crossed the confines of industrial production. The alignment of the workstations anchored to a fixed spot still constituted the standard for office organisation according to the modernist representation of work.2 After the Second World War, as the complexity of production increased, a new organisation model was studied. The “long range task” envisaged another structure of hierarchy and responsibility within the workspace. It was suited for activities not based on sequential organisation and therefore envisaged relatively autonomous groups of employees who were responsible for the overall work cycle and had interchangeable functions. In the context of creative industries, manuals of creative management3 underpin the importance of social interaction and relations between colleagues to manage the process of production. In detail, they stress the importance of breaking tasks in order to switch roles and perspectives disrupting the internal pattern of the creative team. The latter run the risk to create a ‘steady accretion of habits and assumption around individuals and around the group as a whole’.4

On the left. Fig. 38 Fixed metal chair for typewriting in Larking building, Buffalo.

On the right. Fig. 39 Workstation of Johnson Wax building, Racine.

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1

Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros, Tower and Office : From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2003) pp. 190-193 2

Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros, Tower and Office p 186 3

For instance Erik Lerdahl, Staging For Creative Collaboration in Design Teams : Models, Tools and Methods (Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2008) or Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity : from Creative industries to Creative Management (Oxford : Blackwell, 2007).

4

Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity : from Creative industries to Creative Management (Oxford : Blackwell, 2007) p 35

Movement from the private workstation to different protocols of interaction

Same floorplan

Same floorplan

Different floorplan

Different floorplan

Section

Section

General Life Insurance headquarter 1953

Burolandschaft office planning 1960

Centraal Beheer headquarter 1967

Willis and Dumas headquarter 1971

Cisco Meraki headquarter 2013

New Facebook headquarter 2015

Movement form the individual workstation to different protocols of interaction defined by furniture layout.

Respectively from top to bottom: Connecticut General Life Insurance headquarter 1953, Burolandchaft office planning 1960, Centraal Beeher office headquarter 1968, Willis and Dumas headquarter 1971, Cisco Meraki headquarter 2013, New Facebook headquarter 2015.

From static to movement

63

As a result, the formation of creative teams gave rise to a completely new setting of the office space where individual work, private offices and meeting room were combined within the same environment. This put an end to the previous static, linear office that assigned each worker a fixed place where he or she was obliged to remain throughout the workday. Accordingly, the working experience became arranged by a sequence of meetings – sometimes impromptu – with collaborators as well as superiors. Thus, workspace spatially organises around rooms defined by the different degree of boundaries. They regulates the interaction instituting more formal or informal ambience. Glass walls creates privacy yet it does not impede connection of sight, sofas or stools increase proximity and thus liberates from the formal disposition.

Conversely, face-to-face interaction – arranged by the alignment of individual seat – foster exchange that is more formal.

The Bürolandschaft office plan designed by a group of management consultants of the Quickboner Team in 1960 set out to optimise the organisation of the office. The critique of the team was centred on the inefficiency of the corridor deemed not suited for the different level of communication needed among departments. The element that triggered communication was ‘the basis on which the office work was organised: paper.’5 Thus, by arranging all the divisions of the organisation within a unique deep office floor, the underlying logic of design aimed at optimising the time spent by movement in the office. The latter drove the entire planning of the workspace by generating a diagram that zoned the working areas according to the intensity of information exchanged. More intensity entailed more physical communication and thus bustle of employees in the distribution. By establishing various paths for the employees, defined break out areas and recognisable open spaces the planning aimed at creating possible encounters between colleagues. Therefore, the office landscape tried to encompass an environment that would go beyond simple production. The artificial lightening with the new urban rhetoric within the workspace not only broke the physical reliance on the natural light but also embedded a social alternative to the external environment. As Abalos Inaki highlighted, ‘the Burolandschaft definitely eliminated any dependence on the exterior environment [...] The connection between the employee and the building environment was broken’. This was the response on the part of office design to the lack of motivation raised by American labour unions was addressed by a new science, the ‘organizational psychology’ of Frederick Hezberg and Chris Argyris in 1959.6 Hence, leisure time – in this case, the time spent in travelling in the office space – was actively planned by office planning since it was intended to satisfy a new requirement: the employees’ fulfilment and motivation. Clearly, the furniture was tailored around the specific task assigned to each department - and mostly even around the employee.

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5

Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros, Tower and Office pp 198

6

See Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman, The Motivation to Work (New York: Wiley, 1959); and Chris Argyris, Integrating the Individual and the Organisation (New York: Wiley, 1964).

Informal protocol

1

Kitchenette

Formal protocol

2

Large meeting area

3

Large meeting area

4

Conference room

7

Brainstorm room

8

Small meeting area

12

Conference area

0.65 m

0.6 m

0.8 m

0

Open office

5

Work lounge

6

9

Cafe

10

Large meeting area

1.3 m

Small meeting area

11

Small meeting area

0 Open office 1 Kitchenette 2 Large Meeting area 3 Large Meeting area 4 Conference room 5 Work lounge 6 Large Meeting area 7 Brainstorm room 8 Small meeting are 9 Cafe 10 Small meeting area 11 Small meeting area 12 Conference area

Top. Variation of protocols according to direnction of view, proximity and control of boundaries.

Bottom. Fig. 40 Burolandschaft zoning according to expected intensity of interaction between divisions.

From static to movement

65

8 FLOOR SERVICE

9

1 CON ARE FERENC A E

6

AUDIT SECTION

2

5

E IC FF

ND WAGE A SALARY TRATIO ADMINIS N SECTIO

T EFI L N E L B FF AYRO N A ST D P SECTIO AN EMENT

INSURANCE SECTION

R

TI

RE

R TO

EL NN TION O S A PER ISTR IN N IO CT DM SE

EC

R DI

SCIENTIFIC SECTION

3

DIRECTOR

Top. Fig. 41 The ‘corridors’ of the landscape office.

Bottom. Circulation of an employee between departments.

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Chapter 2 : The Leisure Workscape

A

G

IN

AIN

TR

EMPLOYEMENT SECTION

10

PURCHASING

AD

MI NI

ST RA TIV E

SE CT IO N

4

O

T'S IEF CH TAN N OU FICE C AC OF

7

INSTITUTIONAL COST STUDIES

ET

erty prop ting un o acc ion sect

CONTROLLER

G

STAFF NTANT ACCOU

CONFERENCE AREA

D

VISITING AUDITORS

DIRECTOR BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR

BU

INTERNAL AUDITOR

BUSINESS OFFICE LIBRARY

INSURANCE MANAGER

DIRECTOR

Burolandschaft GEG Versand Headquarter Kamen 1963-1964

Recognisable areas in the distribution near to the entries of the workstations apt to foster social interaction.

From static to movement

67

Nevertheless, the planning aspired not only to ameliorate the assignment but also to create membership between employees of the same group. In so doing, specific design expedients were deployed. The workstations were aligned facing one direction according to section since they had to be ‘recognizable optically’.7 Moreover, lounge areas where normally planned and arranged at the corners of the office combined with the service cores. These areas were originally furnished with cloaks, lounge sofas and washing facilities – sometimes micro-kitchen. Those were definite spots that were meant to break the working cycle of the employee whenever he needed. They were circumscribed spaces where workers – supposedly low and high ranks – would have encountered. As a result, the interior design denied the generic zero-degree quality of office plan8, or better, made overt what was already at its beginnings, room for a specific character: business management through furniture design.

BUROLANDSCHAFT FURNITURE ABACUS

from Duffy, Francis and Wankum, Alfons, Office Landscaping : A New Approach to Office Planning ; Layout planning in the landscaped office (London : Anbar Publications, 1969).

L cm

W cm

Table

200

100

Table

180

90

Table

140

70

Typist's desk

100

54

Conference table 130 cm diameter for 8 persons

PLUMBING

Conference table 90 cm diameter for 6 persons Stool (rest rooms, waiting area)

27

64

Occasional or conference table (in groups for meetings of more than 8 persons)

55

55

SYMBOL

TYPE

W cm

Swivel-castor stool Visitor's chair Swivel-castor armchair Visitor's armchair Swivel-castor chair

Settee

Rest room lounge chair

Planter (plant tub) Rest room unit: left to right: draining board, sink with hot water heater, second sink, refrigerator, draining board or vending machine

L cm

Rest room armchair

CHAIRS AND LEISURE FURNITURE

TYPE

DIVIDIERS

TABLES

SYMBOL

70

70

Screen, straight, low Screen, straight, high Screen, curve, low Screen, curve, high

400

65

Double unit, two channel, two-tier, high, open

77

65

Single unit, two channel, low, open

72

65

Single unit, one channel, low, open

37

65

Cloacks rack

Single unit, one channel, low, lockable

40

70

Cloaks cupboard for 10 persons with lockers both ends Cloaks cupboard for 10 persons with locker one end

Manager's armchair

Waiting room chair

Furniture abacus of Burolandschaft office planning.

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Chapter 1 : Leisure as Collective Form

SUNDRIERS

Drawing board

CUPBOARDS AND SHELVES

CHAIRS AND LEISURE FURNITURE

FILING

Display screen

Acoustic booth Trolley or table on castors

160

65

160

65

118

58

Cupboard Low cupboard Book shelves Shelves

7

Duffy, Francis, Office Landscaping : a New Approach to Office Planning (London : Anbar Publications, 1969) p 23 8

See Rem Koolhaas, ‘Typical Plan’ in S,M,L,XL : small, medium, large, extra-large (New York : Monacelli Press, 1995).

Top. Fig. 42 Different direnction of alignement of furniture showing different divisions.

Bottom. Fig. 43 Break out area for relaxation and socialisation usually arranged at the corners of the open office plan.

Chapter 1 : Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intrumentalisation of leisure

69

Since the office landscape planning coped with the alignment of workstations and arrangement of the spaces in-between the various units at the same time, the design referenced urban examples that were borrowed from contemporary urban planning.9 As far as the layout of the workstation is concerned, Inaki and Herreros suggest examples of the new American urban schemes famous at that time in the intellectual milieu such as Mies’s Illinois Institute of Technology Campus and Saarinen’s General Motors Campus both inaugurated in 1956. They constituted – among other postwar urban planning examples – the grounds on which the layout of the workstations was formally conceived. Indeed, the non-geometric configuration of the paths and recognisable ‘social’ areas between the departments reproduced the architectural production of the work of Team Ten. To some extent, the ethic of post-war liberation and customisation of the workstation was embodied within this new ‘formless’ logic of planning. Team Ten tested new urban schemes grounded on the idea of ‘vernacular’10 in order to reconstitute the social sphere and relocate functions over territory.

Likewise, the office landscape re-proposed that distribution diagram in order to pursue the same intention seen in the formation of a social body. Rather than a simple connection between functional areas, the distribution was thus understood as an ‘infrastructure’ designed according to the distance from the work areas – conceived as an urban ‘built area’. This infrastructural distribution would act as social supplier subsumed to productivity. In this regard, the release of Mayo’s book Human Problems of Industrial Civilisation11 brought up the attention on the importance of human relations as a productive asset. Productivity was attached to the sense of identification with the corporate institution addressing the individual worker as a member of the social group. Indeed, sociality was seen as key to integrate the corporation into a social system to give productive value to the relationship between managers and employees.12 Indeed, the manager was seen as a therapist ‘charged with looking after the worker’s psychic well-being’13 and asked to construct the worker’s identification with the corporation understood as a basic social unit – or even comparable to a family. On this topic, the American urbanist William H. Whyte insists on the techniques that were deployed by the corporate management to prevent the social system from working against it. It was instituted a system of ‘nondirective counselling’14 such as individual and secret interviews – even personality and psychological tests – to the workers.

In fact, a group of counsellors paid by the management were asked to help the employees to solve their problems in relation to the working environment. Therefore, the workspace was gradually intended as a field in which worker’s problems could be talked out.15 Nonetheless, the conflation of private instances and working productivity was still organised under hierarchical structure whose leading position was embodied by managers. Moreover, the deployment of psychological support in the workspace established a condition in which the employee had implicitly to ‘adjust [himself] to the group rather than vice versa’.16 Nevertheless, Whyte stresses that this condition was gradually subjected to the entire ‘organisation man’ involving both managers and workers. Indeed, managers henceforth started to submit those personality and aptitude tests to other managers.17

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9

Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros, Tower and Office p 202 10

See Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck : The Shape of Relativity (Amsterdam : Architectura & Natura, 1998).

11

Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan Co., 1933). The book was a publication regarding the experiments conducted on assembly

12

See Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex : Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT, 2003) p 91 13

Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex p 92

14

William H. Whyte, The Organisation Man, rev. ed.

(Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) p 36 15

William H. Whyte, The Organisation Man p 37 16

William H. Whyte, The Organisation Man p 37 17

William H. Whyte, The Organisation Man p 38

Clockwise: Mies’s Illinois Institute of Technology Campus plan, diagram for Cluster City of Geoge Candilis, Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hauptstadt project for Berlin, Saarinen’s General Motors Campus plan.

From static to movement

71

In this regard, the dissertation re-frames the understanding of social group within the workspace. The research points out that rather than a patriarchal re-constitution of a social system, the managerial organisation is now operated through a nonhierarchical system of relations. While Burolandschaft set out to erase the discontents generated by the difference of status across the ranks by eliminating private rooms, it still acknowledges the importance of higher ranks as corporate guidance. The office landscaping planning envisages a customised set of furniture designed to host the meeting as well as providing extra space for storing clothes, relaxing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or having informal meeting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and large wooden tables at the same time. The difference of status was questioned only by the new distribution. Indeed, the private zones allocated to higher ranks still acknowledge the importance of managers in the constitution of the social group as providers.

Fig. 44 Diagram of Quickboner Team showing the inefficiency of circulation in corridor office type as well as its clear inequality in the allocation of rooms.

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Fig. 44 The customise furniture arrangement according to degree of rank. (a) Senior executive work area, (b) executive work area (c) department head or middle manager (d) supervisor or special work function station (e) Work station with extra storage and visitor chair (f) Basic workstation.

From static to movement

73

On the contrary, as stated in the introduction, in Facebook new headquarter there are no allocated rooms for higher ranks – the CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his desk in the open floor plan among his employees – as well as tailored furniture. The study intends to stress this difference as pivotal for understanding the shift of the relationship between employer and employees. I underpin that the increasingly tight collaboration between employees and managers invalidated the top-down structure that used to create a sense of belonging to the corporation. Specifically, the organisation is no longer tied to a system of hierarchical relationships based on exchanges of benefits – psychological or physical. Higher ranks are not anymore directly appointed to integrate the corporation into a social system. The latter is already implied within production. Creative management operates organising personal diversity. In doing so, it is deemed crucial creating ‘constructive disagreements, not smooth harmony or mutual indifference [where] managers must develop connection, without consensus’.18 Additionally, ‘team members need to [mine] their internal resources for new ideas, but also deploying them tactically in response to the other players in the group’.19 Therefore, management is carried out vis-à-vis while working, entailing the psychological status of the members and their relationship with the group. Thus, the basic social unit comes to be reorganised and consolidated by shared commitment based on understanding productivity as a result of working life blended into private life.

In fact, the renovated sense of the identification to corporate institution hinges upon a new working culture – already outlined – based on self-management in which private instances comes to be productive at the very moment they are played out in developing working agreements. In creative industries, the individual is asked to regulate himself and share his system of beliefs – to the degree that he or she deems more appropriated – within the constructed framework of working relationship.

Therefore, the idea of the group came to be constructed around models of living and shared tastes. It leads us to acknowledge the general importance of displaying independence yet being concurrently compliant with common values that resonate with collaborators.

On this fringe, the research attempts to fathom the agency of leisure in the context of the creative workspace. I maintain that leisure as expressive of status embodies the logic of the new ‘organisation man’. It makes possible the construction of a democratic micro-society committed to a working culture characterised by sharing personal belief as the keystone for trust. At the same time, it represents a rather high degree of autonomy among its members to reinforce the shared working ethos as a result of choice. Thus, movement in the workspace comes to have another important value. As stated, it evidently increases the possibility for social exchanges between colleagues and managers. On the other hand, it plays out the very idea of personal freedom and self-expression traditionally envisaged in leisure time. As aforementioned, in post-war France, the idea of leisure embodied components in clear contrast with the alienation of Taylorist production. While serialisation reduced the condition of the worker to the mechanical and uncritical application of task, the possibility of displacement compensated this restrained state. In the context of postwar France, the latter supported the construction of the French subject through the consolidation of personal autonomy opposed to the institutional apparatus. Thus, the sense of belonging to a social group is reinforced by the celebration of personal freedom concurrent with a shared engagement.

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18

Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity p 41 19

Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity p 41

Nevertheless, the action office system attempted to perfect collaboration in the office design. Herman Miller designed it for Alcoa Industrial Design in 1965 was the first attempt to frame the emergence of knowledge work and its organisation through furniture design. It was a system of furniture compounded by components set at a range of low and high heights to promote movement between sitting and standing postures throughout the workday. Its elements, specified with options in size and finish, included high and low desks with varied drawer configurations: conference tables and desks; work tables and mobile side table; specialized desk for display, typewriting and phone communications; and storage units configurable with shelves, shelving organizer, display panels, file bins, and a perch chair.

It was consciously conceived as a system to construct and plan pathways, semi-private areas, and social spaces as well as private requirements.20 On the one hand, it aimed at facilitating visual and informational learning – still based on paper – and on the other, it provided an environment that allowed for interpersonal relationships. In this concern, the implementation of Action Office furniture design stresses the beginning of the conflation between personal relationships and production and its strategic organisation. Indeed, the implementation of Action Office 2 – launched in 1968 – embedded even further the concept of continuous renegotiation of human interaction for working meeting. The model kit shows a zoning of areas according to different modes of interaction. The latter refers not only to the workstation as the interface of learning and producing at the same time but also to the human interface in itself. The boundaries of individual work – standing or sitting – and face-to-face interaction or impromptu meeting started to be directly regulated by the layout of furniture. Indeed, while directly seating placed near the distribution path in Burolandschaft office planning arranged a place for resting or having a chat with colleagues, conversely in the Action Office no protected meeting table contiguous to distribution allowed for an impromptu meeting.

20

Branden Hookway, ‘Mobility as Management: The Action Office’ in OfficeUS Agenda (Zurich : Lars Muller and PRAXIS, 2014) p 90

On the left. Fig. 46 Collaboration in a typical Action Office furniture setting.

On the right. Fig. 47 Control of privacy through movable partitions

From static to movement

75

Fig.48, General Life Insurance headquarter, Hereford, Connecticut.

Chapter 2

From building to village

The Connecticut General Life Insurance headquarters aimed to represent the vision of the city. In order not to lose their workers, the company largely furnished amenities to the workers – drawing upon the lessons learned in capitalist factories.1 According to Frazer B. Wilde, the president of the company, there was an intentional attempt to propose the office of the future and perhaps the city of the future.2 The ‘new city’ was designed to bring work and the activities peculiar of the American city together. The decentralisation the ‘natural’ acted as a favourable context of functional restructuring. While the city was noisy, crowded, multicultural – due to immigration –, expensive, the suburbs appeared to be homogenous, rationalised and with all the amenities required, including retail centres. They were combined with the amenities of the suburbs, such as barbershop, beauty parlour, cafeteria, ping-pong tables, game room, stores, bowling, softball, tennis court, lawn games, barbeque pits, and so on.

Nevertheless, all the amenities were located at the ground floor or at the surrounding.

In doing so, the building established working routines where the working day was broken only in clear moments, such as lunchtime – at the cafeteria – or at the end of the workday while leaving the office.

Aside from the theories of ‘beautiful’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’ that Louis Mozingo traces back to the eighteenth-century to stress the Western origins of the pastoral ideal, the latter proved to be more. It matched the ideal of security, individuality and moral integrity peculiar of the white middle-class nuclear families. Indeed, the image of the ‘city’ was overlapped to the idea of the suburban dwelling. On the one hand, the reproduction of the parking sequence embodied the sense of ownership typical of the household dwelling. On the other hand, ‘city’ stood for collective activities routinised throughout the working day. Additionally, the pastoral location was an opportunity to communicate the prestige to the audience through mass media by careful design. At that time, the corporate campus ‘validate the use of science for profit’. This example opened the way to a strategic relocation of the most important headquarters into the American suburban areas.

Fig. 49 Aerial view of the Connecticut General Life headquarter

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1

According to L. Mozingo some factories provided ‘landscape amenities’ such as playfields, allotment gardens, and parks with pavilions in the immediate area. She calls the latter ‘welfare capitalism’.

Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (London: Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011) p.28 1

Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism p.117

0

10 m

Floortype Office floor (Top rank in black, clerical staff in gey)

Groundfloor Stores, library, game rooms, beauty parlour, cafeteria

Basement Auditorium, Bowling court

Top. Groundfloor of Connecticut General Life headquarter

From building to village

79

Centraal Beeher Office 1967 - Insurance company -

According to the historian Alan Colquhoun, the office Centraal Beheer by Herman Hertzberger in Aperldoorn, Netherlands sets out to ‘provide the possibility of behaviour that is self-motivated’.3 In this context, the self-motivation was proactively fostered by spurring the employees to bring private objects from home. However, the architect refers to the ‘inviting form’ as repetition of a basic cell – 9 x 9 metres. The design interconnected those discrete ‘polyvalent spaces’4 by bridges.

In so doing, the project creates a continuous path where ‘public areas are not cut off from the office cells any more than the cells are separated from each other’.5 The inviting form that would prompt the employees to self-motivated behaviour is clearly played out by the attenuation of division between the spaces for work – the cells – and the bridges. In fact, the latter are not an only connection but also very devices for leisure time and interaction. They establish clear visual connections with the whole system of voids – threated as urban exterior – and the private cells. The semi-public nature of those large corridors – that set up a long enfilade – accomplish a sequence that predisposes for an appropriation of the workstation as private in contrast with their publicness. Thus, the proximity of those counterposed realms and their subsequent interlocked relationship allow for a sense of sharing, which ultimately foster that ‘sense of total community’ outlined by Colquhoun in his essay.6 Moreover, the Centraal Beeher office never reveals itself as a whole. Both the exterior and the interior are not legible as a single organism. The building denies a sense of unity understood as a representation of corporate statement. In fact, the legible repetition of units, the lack of façade, the urban treatment of the atriums, the seamless sequence of private and more public spaces was deployed with a clear intention. The quotation makes it explicit ‘identity is basic but not inbuilt and is often imposed, say as corporate identity by companies who wish to reflect quality and unity to the outside world.’7 With his office, Hertzberger intended to offer a more ‘liberal life’ rather than ‘making an impression’ with his building.8 Therefore, unity and sociality were meant to be emblems of liberty and, in this instance – I would rather say that – the quality and unity to the outside world were introverted and represented in the workspace.

A container that mixed private habits – encouraged by the customisation of the workstation – semi-private instances – chatting at the window ledge of the bridges while watching the bustle of colleagues underneath – and public behaviour – passing across the atria under the sight of people at the balconies.

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3

Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism : Modern Architecture and Historical Change (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1981) p 105 4

Herman Hertzberger, Architecture and Structuralism : the Ordering of Space (Rotterdam : nai010, 2015) p. 140 5

Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism p 105 6

Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism p 105 7

Hertzberger, Architecture and Structuralism p. 146

8

Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism p 109

Top. Fig. 50 The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;humanisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of the workstation.

Bottom. Fig. 51 Lunchtime in the headquarter, a moment dedicated also to the family.

From building to village

81

Fig. 52 View of the atrium. Relaxing moment of the employees in the middle of the brigdges.

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Chapter 2 : The Leisure Workscape

Diagram showing the views between the workstation and the bridges. It highlights also the spatial sequence of private and semi-private areas arranged by the enfilade.

From building to village

83

Willis and Dumas headquarter 1971 - Insurance company -

As data processing and telecommunications systems were perfected in the 1970s, the concept of information flow, which provided the basis for the office landscape, quickly expanded beyond its original premise. The idea of interconnected workstations relied less on contiguity than on incorporating a computerized network that linked workstation one to another regardless of the positions they occupied in space. Thereafter, the idea of personal workstation started to be diluted into a total conception of workspace where circulation had more to do with work and sociality rather than mere distribution.

In this regard, the four floors of Willis Faber & Dumas headquarter by Foster associates in 1971 are pierced by a central lobby. Within the latter, an escalator directly distributes all floors performing a crucial role in the project. As the architect and journalist Gabriele Bramante says ‘Willis Faber Dumas has an exceptionally low staff turn-over and a tremendous community spirit […] there are many friendly chance encounters and office workers greet and recognize each other as they sail past subsequent floors on their escalator sorties up and down’.9 Therefore, the flowing spatial sequence from the entrance runs through the floors linking leisure spaces at the ground floor – a swimming pool, gym and day nursery – the working stations in the middle floors and the cafeteria with the rooftop garden at the top floor. Through movement, the headquarter sets out to create visual frictions between the employees. To this end, the distribution is arranged twofold. On the one hand, the vertical connection provides for physical and visual connection between the levels. On the other hand, a path around the office plan and between the glass façade leads the employees to stroll along the perimeter in direct contact with the outside panorama while passing by the workstations. In this way, the circulation enables an intertwined double loop, one vertical and one horizontal. Therefore, while the outdoor view induced the circular movement, the two leisure areas – one at the top and one at the ground floor – constituted the terminals of the vertical distribution creating the movement up and down.

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9

Gabriele Bramante, Willis Faber & Dumas Building : Foster Associates (London : Phaidon, 1993) p.2 10

Gabriele Bramante, Willis Faber & Dumas Building p.3 11

The firm commissioned a series of painting to the painter Ben Johnson in 1984 that portrayed the swimming pool. He did it before the closure, the only moment of tranquillity since more than 70 people per day used it.

Gabriele Bramante, Willis Faber & Dumas Building p.23

Fig. 53 The internal infrastrucure that directly connects the levels

From building to village

85

Open office plan Swimming pool Restaurant Cafe bar Day nursery Rooftop lawn Mechanics Kitchen

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Fig. 54-57 Collective activities in the headquarter

From building to village

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As evidence, after the ‘90s the computer where accommodated in the internal circulation maintaining the external – as originally intended – free for use as circulation and ad hoc meetings. Within this circulation system, the office space establishes a series of shared practice between the employee and the employer.

Indeed, the green rooftop not only enacts a sense of estrangement – setting the pleasant visual from the restaurant – but also supplies for longer moments of sociality during the breaks. The employees spilt out in the lawn to picnic during lunch or stroll on warm days.10 Similar to a commuting routine, the workers after the workday were gathered together in the presence of their children around the swimming pool next to the nursery area and the coffee bar. The latter became an ideal meeting for office staff and their family after hours and weekends. The offer of this benefit became pride for the company in as much as it contributed to the benefit of the entire staff.11 As far as the arrangement of the office floor plan is concerned, there is no closed office. Unlike Centraal Beheer headquarter, the workstations have identical chairs, desk and partitions and they are just divided by type for individual work and group work – meeting.

Hence, the headquarter set out to provide a democratic work environment. The deployment of almost one type of furniture intended for work along with the lack of private spaces for meeting enabled the idea of a horizontal chain of command.

Not least, the institution of free sociality across the ranks – fostered by the spatial distribution as well as by the agenda of shared leisure activities – reinforced this ostensible erase of hierarchy. In this regard, the aperture to the public as an act in itself perfected the aim. Indeed, sharing of the innermost human sphere that is the family, by including specific leisure functions such as day nursery and swimming pool, contributed to enact and implement a blend of private and public. It completed the sense of community stressed by Bramante.

On the left. Fig. 57 skecth of the external loop On the right. Fig 58 personal computer in the internal distribution.

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The case studies have been selected in order to stress the emergence of architectural tropes in office design.

The interiorisation has involved both the emergence of the circulation as infrastructure and the inclusion of functions typical of the city. Whereas the workstation relied less on the specificity of the task and on a long stay, the entire office design came to be regulated according to the possibility of social engagement and thus relied to the outside to lesser degree. Henceforth, the study focuses on creative industries in order to highlight the implementation of urban design in the workspace.

Interlude

It is enough to say, for now, that contemporary production becomes “virtuosic” (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such. If this is so, the matrix of post-Fordism can be found in the industrial sectors in which there is “production of communication by means of communication”; hence, in the culture industry.1 In creative industries there are two structural deployments, one is projectbased, and another is multi-tasking2. The former occurs more often in a bigger organisation, where the employees work with great intensity and under high pressure on one project, only to split up and be reassembled later. The latter regards especially smaller organisations, in which multiple roles are necessary to be fulfilled at once. Thus, production has become not only a solitary act but also a social experience which depends on complicity between creators and capacity to accommodate and switch between different thinking styles. In this context, team meetings and impromptu meetings are at the core of decision-making and creative production. Indeed, what Virno outlines is that the quality of labour is fundamentally changed. From Fordist to post-Fordist era, productivity came gradually to be regulated by the way employees and managers interact. The main task of the worker in the creative industries is extended to finding solutions that would ameliorate the organisation of labour or the product itself. Following Virno’s point, the role of the employees has gradually become interlaced with political practice. The term political here is understood as the practice that includes ‘linguistic experience as such’ and thus related not only to the sole act of speaking but also the performance of it.

1

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude : for an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York : Semiotext(e), 2004).

2

Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity: from creative industries to creative management (Oxford : Blackwell, 2007) p 27

3

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude p 60

4

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude p 60

As human communication came to be actively involved in the production, it became at the same time dependent on the architectural setting. Following Virno’s point that refers to Guy Debord, the concept performance is related to the one of the spectacle.3 Yet in culture industry, the spectacle comes to be a commodity in itself since it exhibits the most relevant ‘productive forces of [post-Fordist] society […] linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc’.4 He traces a link between money and spectacle, while the former represent exchange, the latter is seen as ‘productive communication’. In this regard, I suggest it becomes a productive way of communication. I argue that the notion of spectacle comes to be tangibly exploited in creative production through the celebration of leisure.

By representing the elision of ‘social’ differences in the entire labour force, the workspace enacts a shared sense of identity that, as shown in the village Club Méditerranée, produce a collective commitment – which in that case was the post-war ethic of fun, the cult of the body and the care of the self. In the creative industries, this commitment has to be found in the celebration of a method of labour in itself. The latter is the one that sees working time in a seamless relationship with leisure time. Therefore, the creative office puts in order and exhibits a method of production at the same time.

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Villa VPRO 1997 - Broadcasting company -

The new headquarter of the Dutch broadcasting company VPRO in Hilversum by MVRDV replaced eleven separate villas – where people were accustomed to finding their place of work, such as suites of the room, attics, conservatory and bel-étage.

The design intended to perform the same environment as much as possible. To this end, the overall image relies on the ‘compactness’ to play out the image of the suburban villa. Though, this compactness generates a dense volume encompassing different configuration of spaces. Those are enclosed offices and open office areas connected by an articulation of holes that perforate the entire volume. In so doing, the firm intended to blur the inside and the outside to the greatest extent possible. The historian Stan Allen, he points out that the ‘design is conceived as artificial ecology’ as ‘complex assemblages of resources, species, and climates in dynamic interaction’.12 Thus, the implementation of the project relies on the densification of spaces characterised by private boundaries and open areas only defined by either diaphanous partitions or carpeting.

As a result, while the horizontal circulation comes to be zoned by subtraction, urban tropes ‘various ramps, grand stairs, small ‘hills’, and slopes’13 construct the vertical one. Hence, the building dematerialises its interior by concentrating outdoor spaces paved with the exterior wood floor, windows facing internal patios and enlarged open spaces in polished concrete – often broken by iron railings and bannisters that protect the various ramps and stairs. However, MVRDV set out to ‘stimulate communication patterns within the building’.14 Exactly, the communication patterns are stimulated by the agglomeration of spaces in which the informality – sitting or dragging on a staircase, relaxing on a chaise lounge, crossing a void passing on a bridge with colleagues, having a pick-nick on the rooftop – has irremediably flocked to the working realm. As Willis & Dumas headquarter, the corporate restaurant lies at the top, yet it extends itself through the building cross wisely. Clearly, the position is pivotal for establishing a movement. It enacts an hourly vertical ‘commuting’ considered together with the parking entrance on the ground floor. As Foster Associates transformed Willis & Dumas office into a lobby by placing the escalator, in Villa VPRO the movement comes to be improved by eliminating the infrastructure and replacing it by the function itself. Notably, the office institutes a shared sense of ownership by placing the parking space right underneath the building – and in great visibility from the internal patios. In this regard, General Life Insurance headquarter

by SOM already reproduced the American pastoral household ideal through the sequence: approaching by car from the landscape, flanking the building, parking at the side of the deck and ultimately entering. Yet, the sense of ownership is replicated and even reinforced in Villa VPRO. The parking hall inevitably enables gathering moments during the day.

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12

MVRDV and Stan Allen, ‘Villa VPRO’ in Assemblage, n 34 (1997) p 108

13

MVRDV and Stan Allen, ‘Villa VPRO’ p 94 14

MVRDV and Stan Allen, ‘Villa VPRO’ p 94

The pierced slabs

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Fig. 59-62 The sequence of spaces.

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Fig. 64 Areas defined by the carpet.

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Cisco Meraki 2013 - Software Ingeneering Company -

The headquarter of the tech company Cisco Meraki shows how the regulation of interaction has been implemented. The case study makes explicit the zoning of the office floor along with the ambition of directing the working protocols through a sequence of formal and informal social exchanges. In particular, the circulation is always flanked by areas that are design for collaboration. In this regard, the headquarter stresses the shift to a corporate space that uses urban tropes to concatenate productive spaces. Therefore, the spatial congestion of formal and informal areas is no longer designed to fulfil a mere sense of community in the office. Nevertheless, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;break outâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; areas come to be inserted into the spatial sequence of the office. Evidently, the latter can host relaxation or collaboration. This new spatial construct directly represent the new working culture, which sees in informal interaction a productive value.

- Study booth -

- Niche -

- Work lounge -

- Small meeting space -

- Large meeting space -

- Large meeting space -

Clockwise. Fig. 65-70 Varius protocols of interaction.

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From building to village

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STUDY BOOTH

BREAK AREA

Enclosed workspace for one person

semi-open or enclosed support space where employees can take a break from their work

Suitable for short term activities which require concentration and confidentiality.

TOUCH DOWN Open work space for one person Suitable for short term activities which require little concentration and low interaction.

Can be suited for workplace ‘rituals’, such as office parties. can be used also for small informal meetings. + usuallty minimum area is 1 per 100 workstation but it depends on the culture of the coproration. + preferably located in or near a break area and busy circulation. + recommended maximum walking distance for any workstation is 50 mt.

SMALL MEETING ROOM Enclose meeting space for two to four people Formal and informal meeting and confidential discussion. No time schedule, often impromptu, for training purpose or brainstorming. + Semi-visual privacy (medium-high partition) + Different size location and atmospheres + Can be bookable workstation

BRAINSTORM ROOM Enclosed meeting space for five to twelve people Suitable for brainstorming sessions and workshops.

Suitable also for meeting and presentations. + when provided with different sitting arrangement the room can host other types of meetings. + one wall should be suitable for projection + typical equipped with flexible furniture, flip charts, white boards and / or smart boards. + mostly booked and maintained

LARGE MEETING SPACE

TEAM SPACE

semi-open meeting space for five to twelve people

semi-open meeting space for two to eight people

Short and informal meeting and presentation. No time schedule, often impromptu, for training purpose or brainstorming.

Suitable for teamwork, frequent internal communication and a medium level of concentration.

+ Semi-visual privacy (medium-high partition). + all attendees should face each other. + No need to book in advance. + Encourage networking and encounters (people passing by can join the meeting). + Can be used as an alternative workstation. + Can be used as a waiting area when not used foor meetings. + Suitable for worksplace ‘rituals’, such as birthday parties and corporate events.

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+ table in the middle of the space enables employees to start a meeting simply turning their office chairs. + protocol for distracting activities, such as speaking on the telephonr, listening to music and informal interaction, is recommended. + desk arranged face to face or back to back.

SMALL MEETING SPACE

TEAM SPACE

Semi-open meeting space for two to four person

semi-open meeting space for two to eight people

Short and informal meeting without specific goals or non-confidential discussion. No time schedule, often impromptu, for training purpose or brainstorming.

Suitable for teamwork, frequent internal communication and a medium level of concentration.

+ Semi-visual privacy. + Different size location and atmospheres + No need to book in advance. + Encourage networking and encounters (people passing by can join the meeting).

+ table in the middle of the space enables employees to start a meeting simply turning their office chairs. + protocol for distracting activities, such as speaking on the telephonr, listening to music and informal interaction, is recommended. + desk arranged face to face or back to back.

+ Suitable for ad-hoc meeting.

OPEN OFFICE LARGE MEETING ROOM

open work space for more than ten people, suitable

enclose meeting space for five to twelve people

For activities which demand frequent communication or routine activities which need relatively little concentration.

Formal and informal meeting and confidential discussion. No time schedule, often impromptu, for training purpose or brainstorming. + semi-visual privacy (medium-high partition)

+ avoid desk arrangement in whic people sit with their back towards circulation routes

+ can be bookable workstation

+ protocol for distracting activities, such as speaking on the telephone, listening to music and informal interaction, is recommended.

CONFERENCE ROOM

WORK LOUNGE

enclosed formal meeting space for twelve to twenty people

lounge-like workspace for two to six people

Suitable for presentation and important business meeting that would involve the higher rank of the company and thus a representation of hierarchy in the furniture.

Suitable for short-term activities which demand collaboration and / or allow impromptu interaction.

+ different size location and atmospheres

+ booked and maintained.

+ when designed as a single continuous bench people might hesitate joining another occupant. + can be an alternative to the allocated workstation. + enables discussion to take place away from open and semi-enclosed workstation.

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individual task

small meeting space

public accessibility

open office

“study booth”

small meeting room

team space

work lounge

break area

large meeting room

large meeting space

brainstorm room

collective task

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private accessibility

“touch down”

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conference room

individual task < 30 minutes

< 90 minutes

“touch down”

“study booth”

small meeting space

small meeting room

< 3 hours

< 5 hours

> 5 hours

open office

longer stay

shorter stay

team space

break area

large meeting space

large meeting room & work lounge

brainstorm room

conference room

collective task

From building to village

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Fig.71, New Facebook headquarter interior street

Facebook headquarter 2015 - Software Ingeneering Company -

The new Facebook Campus designed by Gehry and Partners is said to be the world’s largest open-plan office. It is organised into ‘neighbourhoods’, with a cluster of desks interspersed with enclosed private conference rooms of various sizes. However, the building enables three entwined loops of movement. A meandering path that encloses the various neighbourhoods constitutes the first. A polished concrete in contrast with the chequered carpet of the work areas identifies it. Only the flooring distinguishes the circulation, which is at the same level of the open-plan office. At the same time, it distributes the working quarters chaining them not only to the informal seating spots with sofas stools supplied by micro kitchens but also to the two foodservice points – the café and the restaurant. The second loop is vertical. The lobbies perform an important role in the ‘social life’ of the headquarter. The staircase of the lobby is social condenser and a clear waypoint where the employees encounter during the day. It constitutes the joint of the three loops connecting the parking at the ground floor and the rooftop. The latter accommodates a bar and hosts corporate events.

The Third loop connects the East Campus. It provides collective activities such as retail, gym, restaurants, lending library and workshops in which the employee work on autoconstruction.15 To this end, the East campus offers artists the possibility to organise workshops and exhibition on site and stay in accommodation close to the Campus for two or three months.16 As a result, more than fifty percent – rooftop included – is allocated to collective activities or informal seating. As stated, this can be seen as productive model centred on the collective and the informal.

Indeed, the design partner at Gehry underpins ‘we created a little city under the roof – we practised indoor urbanism’.17 The urbanity is mainly enacted by the devised trope of the street. Within the larger critique on the definition of the specificity of the street, the dissertation refers to the historian Kenneth Frampton, who suggested that it has to be understood in its ’essential double-sideness’.18 Claiming the failure of Smithson’s Golden Lane project because of its single-loaded access and lack of connection with the ground level, Frampton stresses the importance of the programmatic accessibility.19 In fact, under this definition, the study intends to stress the infrastructural nature of the circulation. In this case, the open floor plan is challenged by design. The street makes advantage of the visual connection and establish a clear path at the same time. The corners and the crossroads constitute devices for impromptu interaction. Here, the project challenges the design operatives deployed in the new Facebook headquarters. In fact, the village is constructed around the same concept of infrastructural connection by enabling paths chained to areas for collaboration and collective activities.

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15

‘Facebook Headquarters, Menlo Park East Campus Tour’, 20 September 2015. Available at https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sxp27noEUJA [accessed on 30 January 2017].

16

‘Facebook Headquarters, Menlo Park East Campus Tour’

17

Lee, Lydia, ‘Building types study: 961. Office buildings’, Architectural Record, 203.8 (2015) p 87

18

Kenneth Frampton, ‘The Generic Street as a Continuous Build From’ in On Streets : Streets as Elements of Urban Structure, ed. By Stanford Andreson (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1986) p 309

19

Indeed, addressing the Smithson’s urban planning for Haupstadt Berlin in 1958, he points out the ‘excessive layers of public movement without sufficient public support’. Kenneth Frampton, ‘The Generic Street as a Continuous Build Form’ p 309

0

50 mt

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107

Clockwise. Fig. 72 The rooftop. Fig. 73 The cafeteria. Fig. 74 A typical crossroad in the circulation. Fig 75 Cafe.

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Top. Fig. 76 External view of the lobby.

Bottom. Fig. 77 The staircase of the lobby.

From building to village

109

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0

50 mt

- Crossroad -

0

- Corner -

- Island -

- Corner -

- Island -

50 mt

- Crossroad -

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0

50 mt

0

50 mt

Restaurant - Cafe

Training room

Study booth

Closed office

Conference room

Game room

Micro kitchen

Mechanics - Toilets -

OPEN OFFICE SPACE CLOSED SPACE 52 %

OPEN SPACE 48 % PRIVATE SPACE

COVERED GROUND FLOOR

CLOSED OFFICES

TRAINING ROOM 425 sqmt

MEETING ROOM 2700 sqmt

MECHANIC + KITCHEN + TOILETS

DISTRIBUTION

CLOSED OFFICE 390 sqmt

LEISURE SPACES

CONFERENCE ROOM 1070 sqmt

TERRACE

STUDY BOOTH 1110 sqmt

ROOFTOP

PARKING AREA

Top. Programme diagram.

Bottom. Programme graph.

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Lobby

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LOBBY 890 sqmt

INFORMAL SEATS 900 sqmt MICRO KITCHEN 430 sqmt CAFETTERIA 420 sqmt

CAFE 2000 sqmt

RESTAURANT 810 sqmt GAME ROOM 300 sqmt

Gym Facebook Analog Lab Arcade game room Borrow book cabin Bike Re-work Music room Barber shop Health center IT bar Cafe Mexican restaurant Corean restaurant Thai restaurant Pop-up shop

Relationship with the East Campus.

From building to village

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Chapter 3

Corporateville : design project

The City Council of Menlo Park recently authorised a project of expansion of Facebook Campus. Furthermore, the Council requires the corporation to develop at least 1,500 housing units on the Prologis Site, which would include 15 percent of below market rate units and workforce housing units.1 The forthcoming expansion of Facebook lays the ground for the project that aspires to create a productive community.

Indeed, the design aims at enhancing the productivity – seen in both working production and revenue generating – of the company challenging the urban architectural components already consolidated in the workspace. Although productivity cannot be measured in this context, the dissertation has outlined important parameters through which it is possible to operate. In this context, the project implements the ongoing transformation of the creative corporate workspace as a result of the new mode of production.

In this concern, the study has stressed the importance of social interaction and its architectural regulation within the corporate rationale. Specifically, sociality is entered in creative management through the institution of both informal protocols and shared tasks across the ranks. As stated, the project embraces the new working condition – that entails private habits – contextualised within its new managerial and organisational culture by re-thinking the workspace around the formation of protocols that regards both living and working. It challenges the increasing encroachment of work life into moments of life intended as private – not explicitly included in working time. In fact, the project takes on the current situation and tools used for productivity.

For instance, the real-time exchange that is instituted by using email or other social

Facebook forthcoming expansion.

The Prologis Site, that will accommodate the corporate housing expansion, in the dashed line.

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1

City of Menlo Park, ‘Agenda Item 1-2 Community Development’, 19 July 2016.

Available at http://menlopark. org/DocumentCenter/ View/7789 [Accessed on 29th November 2016].

Fig. 78 Belle Heaven district in Menlo Park, California. Facebook estate at the top.

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media as a medium for collaboration led to restriction law in France.2 The latter requires companies to establish hours in which employees should not answer or send emails. Another example – this time on the part of a company – is represented by the offer of monetary incentives to self-monitoring sleep.3 Additionally, in the context of Silicon Valley, the provision of corporate transportation leads the employee to work while commuting.4 Hence, leisure has become a twofold commodity understood in its binary dimension, space and time. The former is subservient to the new mode of production instituting different protocols of interaction. Whereas, the latter is often subjected to regulation – through incentives to self-management – or continuous intrusion of implicit working obligations. Therefore, the design acknowledges and strains against the situation proposing a clear condition in which the workforce – regardless the rank – overtly share the same living-working situation. This intends to raise aligned routines of life-work cycle to bring forth productive codes of living in the mutual interests. At the same time, it aims at challenging the regulation – implicit or explicit – of private life though the formation of unspoken living rules.

The corporate village establishes two detached loops according to different users.

While the first floor is inhabited by all the ranks of the corporation, the ground floor accommodates single, double and family apartments that can be assigned to the service workers or in leasing. The condition of the ground floor – allocation and leasing – ensures the company to have profitability in case of contraction of personnel. In this case, the project envisages the rental of the entire courtyard – ground floor and first floor – since it can be compartmental. Nevertheless, the co-existence of service workers and tenants aim to fuel the image of the total community, which Facebook tries to establish. The latter is reinforced not only by the provision of housing, but also by the balance of the service workers’ condition. In fact, many high-tech companies rely on external industries such as catering services and transportation services. The condition of these workers is often marginalised.

Indeed, ‘over the past year, labor unions have targeted subcontracted workers at tech

San Francisco

Menlo Park East Palo Alto

Mountain View

Palo Alto

Cupertino

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2

‘French legislator Benoit Hamon, speaking to the BBC, described the law as an answer to the travails of employees who ‘leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash—like a dog.’’

The law was firmly supported by public debate with the motto ‘ David Z. Morris, ‘New French Law Bars Work Email After Hours’, 1 January 2017. Available at http:// fortune.com/2017/01/01/ frenchrighttodisconnectlaw/ [accessed on 1st June 2017].

3

If the employees can prove that they slept for seven hours or more in a row, the insurance company will give them $25 a night, up $500 a year.

Matthew J. Belvedere, ‘Why Aetna’s CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep’, 5 April 2016. Available at http:// www.cnbc.com/2016/04/05/ why-aetnas-ceo-pays-workersup-to-500-to-sleep.html?__ 4

A study conduct in the region of Silicon Valley shows that the second reason to choose an employer-provided shuttle to go to work is productivity while commuting. Danielle Dai and David Weinzimmer ‘Riding First Class: Impacts of Silicon Valley Shuttles on Commute & Residential Location Choice’, 17 January 2014. Available at http:// ced.berkeley.edu/downloads/ dcrp/docs/dai-weinzimmershuttles.pdf [accessed on 31th January 2017].

City

Organization Man W. H. Whyte 1950

Suburbia

workplace (corporation)

home

commuting (automobile)

City

The Technoburb Robert Fishman 1987

Silicon Valley current situation

white collar single family house

Suburbia

home + leisure

workplace (corporation)

commuting (automobile)

City

Suburbia

home

workplace + leisure (corporation)

commuting corporate transportation

Co-existence of corporate headquarters office parks and low-density residences

Co-existence of corporate headquarters office parks and low-density residences

Corporate Village

City

Suburbia

home

workplace

Co-existence of living and working spatially interrelated and partially open to the suburban

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companies for unionization’.5 To improve the situation, Facebook has announced that it would require a paid sick days and increased hourly payment. Rather than a solicitation for improvement of the condition of service workers, the project suggests the possibility of their housing allocation. Indeed, the design aim at integrating the entire labour force and in so doing challenging the village as homogeneous confined environment. On the one hand, it restores a patriarchal relationship – based on the exchange of benefit – with service workers. On the other hand, the open ground floor expands the collective image by hosting different users. To this end, the project relies on the urban characteristics of the village – the infrastructural circulation and the concentration of different services – to operate the multiscalar transformation. In fact, the suburban condition of the Valley, outlined in the introduction, is thus challenged by the interrelation of living and working and by the injection of ‘urbanity’ into the suburban fabric. Indeed, the open ground floor is designed as a continuous urban street by chaining living units and collective activities. The design makes use of the reinterpretation of the village in Port-Leucate by Candilis. In fact, the ground floor is a system of semi-private niches and activities that facilitate continuous interaction. The corporate village spatially organises these activities – that vary according to a degree of collective – into a loop fostering movement between areas. Unlike the holiday village, the ground level of the corporate village is public. Thus, the loop involves also the suburban. It links the neighbourhood of Belle Haven to activities that the City Council of Menlo Park already requires Facebook to provide.6 Those are a library, spaces for workshops and programmed events such as farmer’s markets, movie-night and food truck festivals.7

d) ate ted) c k o r all a ( oc wo + nits + all e v du g n cti lle -base leasi o C ect ts ( ni oj Pr ng u i v Li rk Wo ure + s e ei Liv + L e v Li

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5

Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Silicon Valley’s poorest workers tell government ‘we can’t live like this’’, Thursday 28 January 2016. Available at https:// www.theguardian.com/ technology/2016/jan/28/ silicon-valley-service-workerspoor-intel-tech-facebook [accessed on 13 October 2016].

6

City of Menlo Park, ‘Belle Haven Action Plan’, July 2013. Available at https:// www.menlopark.org/ DocumentCenter/Home/ View/1300 [accessed on 29th November 2016].

7

City of Menlo Park, ‘Agenda Item 1-2 Community Development’, 19 July 2016.

Available at http://menlopark. org/DocumentCenter/ View/7789 [Accessed on 29th November 2016].

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The units establish this urban ‘doublesideness’ through their semi-private interface to the public. These interfaces provide for different protocols of meeting and their openness to the internal path All the units preserve the private zone in the middle of the dwelling. The units on the ground floor are designed to accommodate entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who seek for business agreements in the leisure spaces provided by the village. Additionally, the units can host visitor professors who often train the employee.

On the first floor Managers and IT workers share the same level constructed around the variation of formal and informal working protocols. Specifically, the design interlinks the living-working loop – smaller and tighter to the living units – with a greater loop that accommodates a series of different spaces where informal working protocols are played out. The first loop is formed by a double loaded corridor where the living units are placed on the one side and brainstorm rooms on the other. The latter usually host workshop sessions or brief presentations to colleagues where the formality depends on the topic of the meeting and the composition of the group. The double-loaded corridor establishes a direct connection with working life as soon as the worker leaves his unit challenging the boundaries between working and private life.

While it gives an incentive to collaboration, it nevertheless clarifies the boundaries between two – where two layers, the corridor and the private studio frame privacy.

The spatial sequence also implies collective functions such as a common kitchen and lounges areas – at the corners. The second loop forms a sequence that varies from large to small meeting areas – from six to two places – and face-to-face meeting spaces. It is designed to allow for impromptu interaction while the employee move from one area to the other.

0m

2.3

0m

3.5

0m

4.0

0m

6.2

4.0

0m

The flexibility of the model that provides different brainstorm rooms by extending one side.

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Information Technology worker and Manager room.

Single accommodation.

Ground floor

Double accommodation with individual study room.

Double accommodation with microkitchen and living room.

Family accommodation.

Ground floor

Housing units, scale 1:200

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Shared spaces row of housing units on the 1st floor.

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View from the internal walkway, in-between the units and the brainstorm rooms.

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PRIVATE ACCESS SHARED ZONE + large meeting space + game area

SHARED ZONE + lounge meeting room

INDIVIDUAL ZONE + sleeping + private activities

SHARED ZONE + informal meeting face-to-face

COURTYARD collective activities

VILLAGE LOOP

PUBLIC ACCESS

Double accommodation type A. Leasing, groundfloor.

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PRIVATE ACCESS SHARED ZONE + large meeting space + game area

INDIVIDUAL ZONE + individual study / work

INDIVIDUAL ZONE + sleeping + private activities

SHARED ZONE + informal meeting face-to-face

COURTYARD collective activities

VILLAGE LOOP

PUBLIC ACCESS

Double accommodation type B Leasing, groundfloor.

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PRIVATE ACCESS SHARED ZONE + meeting face-to-face

INDIVIDUAL ZONE + sleeping + private activities

INDIVIDUAL ZONE + individual study / work

COURTYARD collective activities

VILLAGE LOOP

PUBLIC ACCESS

Single accommodation.

Leasing or assigned to service worker, groundfloor.

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PRIVATE ACCESS SHARED ZONE + leisure / socialising

INDIVIDUAL ZONE INDIVIDUAL ZONE + kitchen + sleeping + television + private activities

COURTYARD collective activities

VILLAGE LOOP

PUBLIC ACCESS

Family accommodation.

Leasing or assigned to service workers family, groundfloor.

Design project

129

Informatio Technology worker and Manager accommodation.

Assigned, 1st floor.

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Conference room

SHARED ZONE + kitchen + lounge

PRIVATE ACCESS

SHARED ZONE + all team two by two

INDIVIDUAL ZONE + individual study / work

classes

SHARED ZONE + two by two

WORKSPACE LOOP

COURTYARD collective activities

microkitchen game area

VILLAGE LOOP

PUBLIC ACCESS

Distribution diagram.

Design project

131

132

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0

5m

Groundfloor plan. The coexistence of all the room types around one single courtyard represents just one of many possible aggregations.

The construction of the ramps is indicative, it varies according to the aggregation of the different courtyards.

Design project

133

0

5m

First floor plan.

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0

5m

Rooftop plan.

Design project

135

+ 12.6 m

+ 9.6 m

+ 3.3 m

Top: elevation Bottom: section

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The construction of the courtyard intends to recreate the constant perception of the outside as analysed in the case of Villa VPRO. Indeed, the example of MVRDV dematerialises its interior by pierced slabs. This design operative is also adopted in the New Facebook headquarter. It denies the deep open plan through its large ‘pop-down’ and ‘pop-up’ that descend from the ceiling. Likewise, the courtyard establishes a continuous connection with the outside. To this end, the double-loaded corridor is designed as a covered walkway. Moreover, it enables a continuous view from the two collective rooms at the corners. The quadrangle is formed according to the aggregation of the first-floor row dwelling based on project-based teams.

According to a report conducted on the organisational structure of Facebook, the company operates in ‘small teams‘.8 However, the project allows for having a different composition of teams by modifying the size of the courtyards. This would provide a different gradient of shared spaces to the different teams. Thus, one can imagine the formation of new teams by changing the allocation of the employees.

-8

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4-6

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Co

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3-5

-6

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4-2

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Formation of different courtyards according to the composition of teams.

Design project

137

15

16

17

Second floor 15

Conference room.

16

Conference rooftop.

17

Work lounge / terrace.

18

Work lounge.

First floor 1

Semi-private terrace.

2

Private workstation.

3

Small meeting room.

4

Brainstorm room.

5

Small meeting space.

6

Face-to-Face meeting space.

7

Large meeting space.

8

Small brainstorm room.

9

Large brainstorm room.

10

Lounge area.

11

Shared kitchen.

12

Game space.

13

Work lounge.

14

Kitchenette meeting space.

Ground floor

17 15

18

16

17

17

11 18

1 1

Classes room.

20

Training room.

2

10 2

3

9

4

3

4

9 5

3

6 7

4

5

4

6 8 7

3

6

5

3

6

12

19 20

19

10

11

13

14

12

7

12

5 6 8 7

3

6

12

19 20

14

13 12 12

Exploded diagram of the loops and inventory of workspaces.

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Formal

Informal

Size

private workstation

private touch down

face-to-face mtng space

small meeting space

large meeting space

conference room

face-to-face mtng space

small meeting room

large meeting space

small brainstorm room

rooftop lounge 1

brainstorm room

large brainstorm room

conference rooftop

rooftop lounge 2

kitchenette meeting space

game space 1

work lounge

game space 2

game space 3

Formal and informal spaces of the first loop.

Design project

139

Collective activities Cubicle office Open office Brainstorm rooms Meeting spaces Informal meeting space Conference room Service core

External distribution Internal distribution

The formation of the second loop. The four courtyards can be all internally linked. In this case they are linked two-by two.

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Conceptual diagram.

Design project

141

Public facilities Food Market Running track Workshops Semi-private niches Main plaza / corporate events

Top. Figureground.

Bottom. Functional diagram of the ground floor of the village. Enclosed in the dashed line, the third loop flanked by collective activities and the semiprivate niches. The masterplan aims at creating identifiable waypoints along the loop.

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0

100 m

0

Design project

100 m

143

Chapter 3

Conclusion : the village as corporate model

The research shed light on leisure and how it was attached to the collective. In fact, the idea of leisure time was created in opposition to the notion of alienated work.

By the deployment of incentives and benefit policies tailored against the isolation of industrial production, the French and German State aimed for the formation of National cohesion. As such, leisure came to be associated with the concept of individual freedom and horizontal hierarchy. Henceforth, mass tourism generated profit by the commodification of this collective ethos. Indeed, the latter fuelled the market by the demand of consumerist goods – driven by the cult of the body and the liberated sexuality. In both cases, community – seen in the co-existence of a shared system of belief – constituted the goal of this instrumentalisation. Nevertheless, the State indirectly constructed the latter through the logic of paternalistic provision.

With the growing consumer society, the collective coped with the institution of a shared lifestyle materialised in commercial objects. The village and its spatial constructs on this occasion developed – or was used to develop – a collective subject grounded in sociality. In the context of vacation, the village operated the transition from a community constructed around paternalism to one based on shared lifestyle.

Indeed, it crystallised routines that envisaged personal values.

In this context, the corporate rationale was always based on constructing a common subject. Nevertheless, productivity was not directly attached to the idea of social interaction. Rather, it was embedded into a general outcome that would originate from employees’ fulfilment. According to the transition from Fordism and postFordism, the representation of hierarchy within the corporation has been flattened.

Productive collaboration now is carried out across the ranks. Thus, the corporation initially deployed leisure activities as provisional. In this regard, the transformation of the corporate workspace into a corporate village represents the shift from provisional to shared benefit. Therefore, the village with its living protocols is a model for a productive community centred on communication and trust. Moreover, the project challenges the model of live-work in the relationship between the ranks by establishing a shared life-style. In the context of a flattened representation of hierarchy, the village is understood as corporate model.

The village as corporate model

145

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Image credits

Fig. 01 Proposal for the new Google Campus. https://www.images.adsttc.com Fig. 02 Proposal for the new Google Campus. https://www.factologia.net Fig. 03 Proposal for the new Google Campus. https://www.media.gotraffic.net Fig. 04 The Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at his desk in the New Facebook HQ. https://www.pagalparrot.com Fig. 05 Connecticut General Life Insurance headquarter, Hereford, Connecticut.

Taken from Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism : A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (London: Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011) p 42 Fig. 06 Club Meditérranée village in Corfu, Greece, 1960. https://www.commons. wikimedia.org Fig. 07 Club Meditérranée village in Corfu, Greece, 1960. Taken from youtube video ‘French Village in Greece (1962)’, 13 April 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x9i53dgsuLY Fig. 08 Staircase of the new Facebook campus. Photo taken by me on 10 August 2016.

Fig. 09 Suburban single family dwelling in Menlo Park. Photo taken by me on 10 August 2016.

Fig. 10 The typical shop floor, according to the Beauty of Labor. Taken from Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy : Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007) p 81 Fig. 11 The communal kitchen. Taken from Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy p 84 Fig. 12 From elite to mass tourism. Taken from Tom Avermaete, Another Modern : the Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (Rotterdam : NAi Publishers, 2005) p 336 Fig. 13 Jeunesse Camping. https://www.clajsud.com Fig. 14 French landscape amenities. https://bakersfieldblonde.com Fig. 15 Tourisme and Travail advertisement. Taken from Sylvain Pattieu, ‘Nous n’avons rien à Katmandou’ in Production Militante et Usages Populaires du Tourisme, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, May 2007, 170, p. 88-101 Fig. 16 Tourisme and Travail advertisement. Taken from Sylvain Pattieu, ‘Nous n’avons rien à Katmandou’ in Production Militante et Usages Populaires du Tourisme, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, May 2007, 170, p. 88-101 Fig. 17 From elite to mass tourism. Taken from Tom Avermaete, Another Modern p 336 Fig. 18 Development of mass tourism. Taken from Tom Avermaete, Another Modern p 337

152

Image credits

Fig. 19 Palinuro. https://giornaledelvilento.it Fig. 20 Club Med showers. Taken from Architecture Francaise, May-Apr 1975, 30-33 Fig. 21 Club Med Playful event https://lastswords.blogspot.com Fig. 22-28 Various activities of Club Med Corfu. Taken from you tube video ‘French Village in Greece (1962)’, 13 April 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x9i53dgsuLY [accessed on 11 April 2017] Fig. 29 View of the village ‘Houses associated with Boats’ by Candilis. Tom Avermaete, Another Modern p 352 Fig. 30 Row of dwellings. Tom Avermaete, Another Modern p 352 Fig. 31 Buck’s restaurant. https://www.hdnux.com Fig. 32 Coupa Café. https://www.images.forbes.com Fig. 33 Weiner and Dorsey hiking meeting. https://www.everybodywalk.org Fig. 34 Zuckerberg walking meeting. https://www.inverse.com Fig. 35 Meeting Neutron Interactive. https://www.money.cnn.com Fig. 36 Google pranks. Taken from Eric Schimidt and Johnathan Rosemberg, How Google Works (John Murray : London, 2014) p 60 Fig. 37 Philip Morris Research Centre. Taken from Nina Rappaport, Ezra Stoller, photographer (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2012) Fig. 38 Metal chair Larking building. Taken from Abalos, Inaki and Herreros, Juan, Tower and Office : From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2003) p 182 Fig. 39 Workstation Johnson Wax. Taken from Abalos, Inaki and Herreros, Juan, Tower and Office p 191 Fig. 40 Functional diagram Burolandshaft office planning. Taken from John Pile, Open Office Planning : A Handbook for Interior Design and Planners (London : Architectural Press, 1978).

Fig. 41 Burolandshaft office planning. Taken from John Pile, Open Office Planning : A Handbook for Interior Design and Planners (London : Architectural Press, 1978).

Fig. 42 Interior of office landschape. https://www.blog.fabric.ch Fig. 43 Leisure areas burolandschaft. http://www.buerolandschaft.net Fig. 44 Corridor office. Taken from John Pile, Open Office Planning : A Handbook for Interior Design and Planners (London : Architectural Press, 1978).

Fig. 45 Furniture of the rank Duffy, Francis, Office Landscaping : a New Approach to Office Planning (London : Anbar Publications, 1969).

Fig. 46 Action office. Taken from Hookway, Branden, ‘Mobility as Management: The

Image credits

153

Action Office’ in OfficeUS Agenda (Zurich : Lars Muller and PRAXIS, 2014).

Fig. 47 Action office 2. Taken from Hookway, Branden, ‘Mobility as Management: The Action Office’ in OfficeUS Agenda (Zurich : Lars Muller and PRAXIS, 2014).

Fig. 48-49 Taken from Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism : A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (London: Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011).

Fig. 50 Workstation at Centraal Beheer office. Taken from Kuo, Jannette (editor), A-Typical Plan : Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office Building (Zurich : Park Book, 2013).

Fig. 51-52 Atrium and cafeteria at Centraal Beheer office. Taken from Hertzberger, Herman, Architecture and Structuralism : the Ordering of Space (Rotterdam : nai010, 2015).

Fig. 53-59 Activities Willis and Dumas HQ. Taken from Gabriele Bramante, Willis Faber & Dumas Building : Foster Associates (London : Phaidon, 1993).

Fig. 60-63 Taken from Ilka Ruby MVRDV Buildings (Rotterdam : NAi /010 Publishers, 2015).

Fig. 64 Zoning in Villa VPRO. Taken from Wim Wennekes, Villa VPRO : De Wording van Een Wondere Werkplek (Hilversum : VPRO, 1997).

Fig. 65-70 http://www.retaildesignblog.net Fig. 71 Facebook street Taken from Lee, Lydia, ‘Building types study: 961. Office buildings’, Architectural Record, 203.8 (2015).

Fig. 72-77 Lee, Lydia, ‘Building types study: 961. Office buildings’, Architectural Record, 203.8 (2015).

Fig. 78 Aerial view Menlo Park. Taken from Google Earth.

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Image credits