Examples of architecture, office/laboratory design and amenities for alpha geeks

March 12, 2008 2:18 PM

I'm looking for interesting or noteworthy examples of architecture, office/laboratory design and amenities for alpha geeks, i.e. programmers and scientists — or writing about these things.

I'm thinking about a range of things here, from the large 20th century corporate labs (like the Union Carbide HQ and other labs written about in this NYT article) to dot com approaches to programmers' working spaces (e.g. Fog Creek, Fresh View) to striking and wealthy academic institutes (e.g. The Perimeter Institute and Salk Institute). I'm also looking for examples of unusual amenities offered to employees/academics/students: free transport, food and drink, games, etc. Basically all the things architects and managers do to make the working environment for their "creatives" a more pleasant place to be, to maximize the amount of time they spend there. This is for a film project, so the more visually interesting the better — it doesn't necessarily matter if the buidling, feature or amenity failed (which is clearly true of the large rural labs).

Articles, photography, book references are all welcome — whatever you got! If it's a building/article/cool-thing-employees-at-Google-get-for-free not cited above then please assume I don't know about it.

posted by caek to work & money (5 comments total)

First: The Getty Center in LA, of which a major portion is dedicated to research and not accessible to the general public. The research portion of the complex is the donut-shaped building across the garden from the main museum. I believe you can readily google images of the buildings if you need to see them.

Second: Haven't seen it myself, but the new Bloomberg building in NY seems to have a bunch of stuff. Free snacks in the area that the building's circulation centers on, *extremely* open office design, numerous meeting rooms available for anyone who needs one, etc. There was an article on it in Metropolis in 2005 or so--the article's on their website behind a subscription wall.

Third: S.C. Johnson Wax buildings in Wisconsin, by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Your request is fairly broad, so there's really quite a few examples in the architecture category, but those are some of the better ones that come to my mind immediately. I'll post again if I think of more.
posted by LionIndex at 3:30 PM on March 12, 2008

I was aware as I was framing it that my request is very broad, but those are all great, thanks! I guess what I'm looking for is examples of workplaces for scientists and programmers that have been constructed in such a way as to insulate them from the outside world and encourage them to spend as much time as possible at the office.
posted by caek at 4:22 PM on March 12, 2008

I was told on a tour of its campus that Stanford's Computer Science building has full bathrooms, i.e. showers, for all-night (and possibly all-week) programming sessions.
posted by chan.caro at 8:42 PM on March 12, 2008

Time has a nice slideshow of google's campus, a.k.a. the Googleplex. If you google "googleplex tour" you'll get lots of other good photos and descriptions, but I'm too lazy to turn them all into links here. I've never been there, but my reactions to what I've read about the place seesaw between "Wow, that would be awesome!" and "Oh my god they're brainwashing people to ENJOY never leaving work!"
posted by vytae at 9:29 PM on March 12, 2008

For some interesting infrastructure, in the early to mid 1990s, MIT had ethernet everywhere, including (uh, so I'm told) the maintenance areas near the steam tunnels.

For corporate geek architecture and interiors, I'd recommend looking for newspaper style pieces on: Thinking Machines (Cambridge, MA, circa 1990 - 1995: lots of custom carpet, door hardware, furniture, and open-plan design), the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), SGI (SF Bay Area, circa 1995), Pixar (Emeryville, CA), and Applied Minds (Glendale, CA).
posted by zippy at 12:37 AM on March 13, 2008