770 Broadway will hold two floors of Facebook’s new Frank Gehry-designed offices. Photo: via nymag.com

Frank Gehry seems to be the architect of choice for Facebook. The social media giant has now entered into another partnership with the starchitect, to design its new office space in the heart of Manhattan. Previously, Facebook had been using 150,000 square feet of space in the Bank of America tower near Grant Park and Grand Central Terminal. According to this statement (via gawker.com) from Facebook Engineering NYC, the new 100,000 sf office will have:

… big, open spaces for people to work and collaborate, and lots of room for conference rooms and cozy spaces where people can meet or grab a white board to talk through ideas on a whim. We’ll have plenty of video conferencing equipment to make meeting with our colleagues in other offices really quick and easy. We’ll have room to build out a full service kitchen and serve great food throughout the day. And, of course, we’ll still have all the other Facebook benefits like free laundry, gym memberships and lots of paid vacation.

In other words, this will be an awesome place to work. Located within trendy NoHo, and next to NYU and Washington Square Park, this is also some prime real estate. Architecturally, what can we expect? If Gehry’s Facebook West campus is any indication, it will be a playful and open design facilitating Facebook’s informality and collaboration.

Frank Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg review the model for Facebook’s West campus in Menlo Park, California. Photo: via arch2o.com

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The New Haven, Marseille, 2013.

When the San Francisco-based artist (and avid surfer) Jay Nelson wanted a car he could sleep in for his frequent trips to the coast, he didn’t need an RV—just a new way of looking at a sedan. Nelson had acquired a rusting 1986 Honda Civic, and with the addition some plywood, fiberglass, and a set of porthole windows, he built himself a barn-style bedroom over the trunk. If Buckminster Fuller had been a beach bum, he might have arrived at a motor-pod like this. Sleeping in cars never looked so good!

Since that first rusted Honda, Nelson has unleashed his woodworking skills on a string of consumer vehicles: He’s hitched his faceted plywood domes to cars, boats and, once, a scooter. No two rigs are ever alike, but they all have a rack for a surfboard.

Now, as a newly minted artist in residence at Facebook, Nelson is working on a design for Silicon Valley’s youngest architecture snob, Mark Zuckerberg. Read more!

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Photos: Frank Gehry/Gehry Partners via Bloomberg

Forget the lead photo and headline. Pretend like you didn’t know that Frank Gehry has designed Facebook’s new 433,555-square-foot campus expansion. If it were up to Zuck & Co., you’d have no idea who was the architect behind The Social Network’s “very anonymous” new building. It’s just that unspectacular. Because when you want bland, everyone knows you call Frank Gehry. (That could work either way…)

Earlier this week, Facebook got the go-ahead from the Menlo Park city council to commence construction on “Facebook West,” the new block of facilities that will sit just across the road from the company’s current Paolo Alto digs. The 4-0 vote passed rezoning measures that would exempt the very long office building from current legislation that prevents buildings to exceed 35 feet in length. The council also signed off on an environmental report that sanctions the expansive project as ecologically responsible. Continue. 

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Yin Yang House in Venice, California, by Brooks + Scarpa. Photo © John Lindon.

Based in sun-soaked Los Angeles, Brooks + Scarpa reigns supreme when it comes to creating gorgeous, modernist dwellings that blur the line between inside and out. The firm (formerly known as Pugh + Scarpa) boasts a diverse portfolio—from affordable housing to million-dollar homes—and has raked in a giant pile of accolades, including the AIA’s prestigious National Firm Award in 2010. Their portfolio includes such stunners as the Yin-Yang House, a super-sustainable, single-family dwelling with a series of courtyards and expansive communal areas, and Orange Grove Lofts, industrial-style units that features copious amounts of light. As you can see from the photos, these guys know how to create a stellar pad!

Lucky for us, they’ve agreed to impart some of their wisdom. In collaboration with KOHLER, we’re launching a live chat on our Facebook page this month with Angela Brooks, firm principal, and Emily Hodgdon, senior architect. The two will field your questions about kitchen trends, from maximizing space to specifying the best products. On October 22 at 1 p.m., log into our Facebook page and post your questions and thoughts, or submit them in advance to editorial@architizer.com. Don’t be shy!

Click through to see more photos!

Yin Yang House in Venice, California, by Brooks + Scarpa. Photo © John Lindon.

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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.

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Now that the world is moving toward cloud computing, where information, applications, and files are stored on the web instead of on personal devices, a new type of infrastructure has become necessary: data centers. Often these are energy hogs, requiring huge amounts of electricity to supply and cool the servers inside, but now, greener alternatives are being sought. Read more.

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Collaboration is king. This very real (contemporary) praxis is reflected in the design of new “sociable” workplaces (think Google, Facebook, AOL) where, amid ping pong tables, bean bags, in-house coffee bars, turntables, and even a Carsten Höller-slide or two, co-workers mingle, bond, collaborate, and “create”. The stringent parameters of the cubicle office have given way to the flexible and neutral workplace, rendered as literal “Play Time“, primed with all manner of dorm-room tchotchkes and infantilized whimsy to lure and keep the nomadic worker “on-site” as long as possible.

Still, there are companies struggling to keep up or even incapable (fiscally, managerially) of doing so. It’s for these 1.0 workspaces that Arianna De Luca created the new NINO office system, a flexible workstation that distills the infrastructure ostensibly necessary for collaborative work–namely, a vacated, open-floor warehouse with a couple macchiato machines and lounge sofas in tow–down to its essences: adaptibility, mobility, and sociability. The result of two years of research, NINO intends to facilitate and foster new connections between co-workers, who can easily manipulate and reorient the station to meet their immediate needs. A series of satellite objects such as laptop stands, writing boards, and lamps shoot out from a tall, slender pole; each of the orbiting platforms can be raised or lowered to accommodate both the reclining worker and the coffee they’re nursing.

De Luca’s explanation is simple and well thought out, “In depth practice-based research highlighted the need for tools and conditions capable of supporting mobile, flexible and social dynamics within the work environment. Nowadays most workers spend 60% of their working day away from the desk and all the tools we daily use at work (laptops, mobile phone, cloud computing etc) do not require anymore static and fixed positions. But companies still allocate a huge expense to buy and install workstations that are occupied only a few hours per day. NINO office system introduces a new mobile and multifunctional solution which allows companies to provide fewer workstations used as working hubs in a more suitable way for the contemporary worker.”

The NINO flexible office system is currently on exhibit at New Designers 2012 at the Business Design Centre in London.

[via freshome]

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Hearst Building (left), Gareth Pugh Spring/Summer 2009 (right), image via T Magazine..

Architecture and fashion. It’s a convergence we’ve seen time and time again, whether in Adolf Loos’s polemical essays about proper dress or in the twisted rubber of a pair of Lacoste sneakers designed by Zaha Hadid. We recently got a chance to speak with Karen Moon, co-founder of the newly launched StyleMusée, about the overlap between these two areas of design. StyleMusée is described as “a customizable style inspiration board keeping you at the pulse of fashion. It lets users visually explore the fashion industry’s social media posts on Facebook to discover designers and muses they love… and never knew they loved.” Their hope is to eventually take the style inspiration that people find in social media and offer tailored shopping recommendations. Their first editorial, Architectural Interpretations, immediately caught our attention, and Moon gave us the lowdown on building, dwelling, thinking…and dressing. Check out the interview after the jump.

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Before Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg launched a Hot or Not-type website that got him into trouble with the Harvard administrative board. Remember? After picking a fight with his girlfriend, who promptly dumps Zuck’s condescending arse, and returning home to post an irate and petty blog post (livejournal!) about the incident, we watch the budding Time person of the year aggressively code his way past privacy barricades on his way to building Facemash, a site which pitted photos of two Harvard girls against each other, with students ranking them according to levels of “hotness.” Whether the events actually unfolded in the manner of a Hollywood bank heist doesn’t matter because that’s how they did for most of us. Thanks to “The Social Network”, we see Mark Zuckerberg but we hear Jesse Eisenberg.

But back to Facemash. The site model may seem a bit antiquated (the dubious ethics behind its content is beyond dispute at this point), but here we are, with Beautiful Streets, which pairs two randomly selected Philadelphia streets and asks the user to decide which is more beautiful. ”What makes a beautiful street, or a pleasant neighborhood?,” the site asks. “Maybe that’s hard to define, but can you tell a beautiful place from somewhere that’s not so hot?” What turns out to be another outlet of fleeting distraction can actually provoke some interesting insights. When presented, for example, with a shabby collection of old row homes or immaculate suburban lawns, do you immediately go for the “urban” street or for the cul-de-sac, and why? Are you faced with the dilemma of restraining your nostalgic or base aesthetic impulses in favor of your educated opinions? Maybe? OpenPlans, the makers behind Beautiful Streets, want to see how digital tools such as Street View help shape urban planning projects. The group also hopes to “experiment” with the data it collects from user responses (like Zuckerberg?) and posts the results on the site for all to download (definitely not like Zuckerberg).

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Square HQ, photo (c) Jasper Sanidad.

AOL. Facebook. Yelp. StubHub. eBay. Most recently, the up-and-coming Square. Studio O+A‘s client list reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley.

Last week we had the chance to chat with Director of Design Denise Cherry, who revealed the dream client still missing from the list (hint: they’re trying not to be evil), among other secrets of an innovation architect (for example, most of the “workers” in these photos are O+A employees). Much like the superstar tech clients she works with, Cherry is a youngster: she started as an intern at Studio O+A in 2005, working her way up the ladder with remarkable speed. Click through for Our interview, plus exclusive images of their newest project.

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