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Rethinking office space

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Re: Rethinking office space

#61

Post by Animats »

Facebook's new building is a big open-plan office space, with some stuff to break up the visual sight lines. Since they're currently open-plan, that probably won't affect productivity much one way or the other.

There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's depressing just to visit. I'd hate to work there.

Apple's new mothership[2] definitely indicates an edifice complex. It could work out, though. Apple is currently spread over a large number of modest buildings separated by busy roads. The mothership is a big round building with a lot of underground parking. Just getting most of their people within walking distance will be a win. Of course, that assumes Apple allows them to talk to each other.

The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.

The classic edifice in Silicon Valley is IBM Almaden Research, from the 1960s. You enter through a modest gate and drive through rolling hills for a mile, until you reach the big glass and steel complex atop the mountain. The cafeteria looks out on miles of unblemished parkland. A lot of good stuff came out of there, including three Nobel prizes. Today, it's a shadow of what it once was. Part of it is rented out.

Overdoing this sort of thing is rare in the US today. Moscow, Dubai, and Beijing, though...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZmos0GSCWE [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2784069

Re: Rethinking office space

#62

Post by msandford »

toast0 wrote: post #42
kansface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mountain View (all of Silicon Valley, really) has the bad habit of approving anything that brings in new jobs while simultaneously rejected housing commensurate to the number of jobs added. Many of the residents of the valley want their cities to remain de facto suburbs (designed for cars). Throw in prop 13, a substantial number of well paid transplants, and you have a recipe for the extreme cost of living in the Bay…

Honest question, how does prop 13 increase the cost of living?

I would guess that by reducing property tax you've made it possible for housing prices to go ever higher. This makes housing SEEM less affordable for sure (since the prices can continue to rise higher), and might also actually make it less affordable too as people are happy to build ever more expensive housing since the property tax rates are lower.

A certain niceness of a house in a certain market will tend to sell/rent for $X per month, no matter how you arrive at $X. So if property taxes are high, it tends to reduce the actual price of the house since people don't just pay a mortgage, but rather have to pay everything associated with the house; mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc.

This is a similar phenomena to the low interest rate, high property price that we've witnessed over the last decade or so in the US. At 4% a 200k house costs about $1k/mo once you roll in some kind of property tax and PMI. At 8% $1k/mo buys you less than 100k of house again assuming the same property tax and PMI.

Re: Rethinking office space

#64

Post by smokinn »

toast0 wrote: post #42
kansface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mountain View (all of Silicon Valley, really) has the bad habit of approving anything that brings in new jobs while simultaneously rejected housing commensurate to the number of jobs added. Many of the residents of the valley want their cities to remain de facto suburbs (designed for cars). Throw in prop 13, a substantial number of well paid transplants, and you have a recipe for the extreme cost of living in the Bay…

Honest question, how does prop 13 increase the cost of living?

Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.

So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density.

If people can stay in their single family 1.5 or 2 million dollar homes and pay property taxes on the 30k they bought it for 30 years ago density won't happen because those are the people that vote and they'll keep voting for municipality limits on building to "keep the character of the neighborhood".

Re: Rethinking office space

#65

Post by lwhalen »

The concept looks super cool, but that Radcliffe guy needs to fix his bad habit of ending most every sentence with a question?

It's very distracting to the overall flow and feel of the video?

I wonder how long it'll take for the first buildings to come to fruition?

Re: Rethinking office space

#66

Post by kabouseng »

Reminds me of the following passages from Masters of Doom[1]

"When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling.

But there were problems, the agent explained. The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air-condition.

Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there’s nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work. The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers’ finicky tastes. Instead, they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn’t just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers’ paradise and all one saw were rows of caves."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom

Re: Rethinking office space

#67

Post by logfromblammo »

mbrzusto wrote: post #30

wouldn't it be better to use existing structures, like all the abandoned malls in the usa? why not distribute the workforce so people can live in an affordable, commutable area? and it bugs me further they couldn't find a way to locate walking distance to bart or caltrain.

I used to work for a company that leased spaced out of an old mall. They also built their own huge new corporate office campus and moved everyone into it while I was there.

I actually preferred the mall space. There was a movie theater and a drivers' license annex in it, and some lunch-friendly restaurants. The commute was faster. Parking was never a problem. City buses stopped there.

The new corporate headquarters was in the middle of nowhere. You had to drive for 15 minutes to get anywhere else that you might want to be, including spiraling up all those ramps in the underground parking garage. It was well done architecturally, and very pretty, but I don't care about that while I'm working. And when I'm done working, I want to go somewhere else, and do something that is not work.

The supposed benefit to collaboration was not realized by reducing the walking time between offices. The people that worked together most often were still seated the same distance from each other, and from their regular conference rooms. Anyone not physically present was still brought in via conference call. The increased distance to anything else made it more likely that you would miss someone who was out to lunch, at an appointment, or on a personal errand. The start and end of ordinary business hours created localized traffic congestion.

So yes, it would be better to have a more distributed workforce.

Re: Rethinking office space

#68

Post by kps »

jarjoura wrote: post #36

It's interesting that Google's office plan is garnering a lot of negative feedback. When Apple announced a plan to make one giant office building to house its entire corporate workforce, the general consensus was positive. Even Cupertino's politicians praised its ambition and assumed wealth it will bring to the city. Has anyone been in Cupertino recently? It feels like almost every single office building in that city…

  > Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple
  > needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.
That would never happen
¹.


¹http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/January-2014/In-P...

Re: Rethinking office space

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

smokinn wrote: post #64
toast0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, how does prop 13 increase the cost of living?

Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value. So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density. If people…

> Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it

No, it restricts increases in the basis value to which the tax rate is applied to a maximum of the value after purchase (or other qualifying event) + 2% per annum.

> unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.

A number of other states have Prop 13 like limits to the annual increase in tax basis value, and some others do full market valuation but split the increases over a several year period so that the tax basis value lags the increase, and other places just have fairly infrequent reassessment except at purchase (which, in effect, also causes tax basis value to, on average, trail behind increases.)

Re: Rethinking office space

#70

Post by pc86 »

jasonkester wrote: post #35
habosa wrote: post #23

I work at Google in MTV and this is very exciting to me. I think the higher-ups at this company have the vision to pull this off, I hope I stay engaged here long enough to see it. The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live…

For what it's worth, MTV doesn't mean Mountain View to anybody who doesn't live or work in Mountain View. To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.

For what it’s worth, I live on the east coast, am not particularly keyed in to the Silicon Valley world like most HN readers, and knew (assumed) immediately that MTV = Mountain View based on the context of the article and the comment. I think it’s pretty obvious given the overall context here.
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