Photos: Frank Gehry/Gehry Partners via Bloomberg

Though its stock might be falling by the day, Facebook is forging on with a new campus, Facebook West, designed by Frank Gehry. Bloomberg has a first look of the immense project, which is set to break ground in spring 2013. Located across the highway from Facebook East HQ, the design is retro-Gehry, in that it lacks the ebullient curves and willful (but blank) gestures that characterize the architect’s most popular buildings. Instead, the campus consists of one giant Platonic volume spanning 420,000 square feet that’s internally organized into “neighborhoods”; these consists of work pavilions amassed “in curving arcs like swarms of fish” that are set against large feature walls festooned with graffiti and arcade games. The work clusters flow into one another so as to foster a sense of community among the social network’s employees, many of which who regularly work long hours and for whom the new structure will become a kind of second home (sans vacation and sandy beaches). Of the ten-acre open floor plan, Gehry says that his team had “to give them [Facebook] a system that’s not precious, that they can manipulate.” Here they can freely roam about and congregate at various formal and informal meeting points such as cafes, lounges, and the incredible roof garden, which will be planted with thick clusters of trees, flora, and other landscaping.

Read more about the project at Bloomberg.

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged campus, corporate architecture, facebook, Facebook West, frank gehry

more articles by Samuel Medina