Posted on 07/23/2017 2:01:23 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
From California to London, the tech giants are employing top architects to build spectacular symbols of their immense global power. But they have their critics…
We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification, of chirps and squeaks and bright, shiny things – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon. Graphics – rounded corners, lower case, Google’s primary colours, Twitter’s birdie, Facebook’s shades of blue – enhance the innocence and infantilism. It is a world, as Jonathan Franzen once said, “so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self”. Until we chance on the bars of the playpen and find that there are places we can’t go and that it is in the gift of the grown-ups on the other side to set or move the limits to our freedom.
We’re talking here of virtual space. But those grown-ups, the tech giants, Apple, Facebook, Google and the rest, are also in the business of building physical billion-dollar enclaves for their thousands of employees. Here too they create calibrated lands of fun, wherein staff offer their lives, body and soul, day and night, in return for gyms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, climbing walls, basketball courts, running tracks and hiking trails, indoor football pitches, massage rooms and hanging gardens, performance venues, amiable art and lovable graphics. They have been doing this for a while – what is changing is the sheer scale and extravagance of these places....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Daniel 4:30 The tech mogul spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?
If you hike the South Bay hills from Palo Alto to San Jose, you see the Apple Spaceship gleaming in Cupertino. It now dominates the landscape as a reference point the way Hoover Tower at Stanford, Moffett Field, the salt ponds, or the tents at Shoreline Amphitheater did in an earlier time. It is an amazing architectural tour de force.
They are entitled to do whatever they want with their money.
I look forward to seeing it next time I’m out that way. I think it’s a good thing that corporations put a little architectural effort into their HQ. I work across from the Chrysler Building in NYC and even though it was built in the 1920s, it’s still magnificent to look at every day. I even liked the Pan Am building before it got changed to MetLife.
The Chrysler Building is still gorgeous, isn’t it? Great design.
Little known factoid — Apple is simultaneously building a second HUGE campus at Wolfe & Central Expressway that also has beautiful “mini-spaceship” design.
America used to build awe-inspiring structures, feats of engineering that impressed the world. Now Arabs and Asians are the ones doing this.
Awesome buildings are part of making America great again.
So what?
They have the money
Having a nice work space is a good thing
This ain’t new. Silicon Valley companies for decades have used the physical plant as an added value during hiring
It’s not the facilities that grinds, it’s the mindset.
And the same tools who so adore the modern tech utopia would rail about 1950s corporate America, which to my mind was far more wholesome than the fake world these idiots live in.
Every so often, The Guardian reminds us that it is socialist at heart! The rich make its employees break out in hives, except for those already embedded in the LEFT!
They all appear cold and soulless. It is easy to come up with that which doesn’t seem to have a soul. It takes true vision to create a place that seems friendly, human, comfortable, inviting and beautiful, and also awesome. These are the same old, same old.
The new actual heads of the elites and the top one percenters - the class of arrogant technologists.
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