ABSTRACT
Silicon Valley remains a landscape of industrial lots and office-parks – cost-effective tilt-ups are the vernacular of the valley. The Googleplex, a corporate campus built in 1994 for Silicon Graphics by Studios Architecture, is a mass broken into blocks and diagonally intersected by linked green squares. Between 2009 and 2011, Apple, Facebook and Google announced plans for new campuses in Silicon Valley. The formation of Silicon Valley was itself a result of job-hopping and disloyalty, beginning with William Shockley’s departure from Bell Labs to form his own laboratory with his brightest staff in 1955. The Silicon Valley way of doing things originates in the management styles of high-tech companies in the mid-20th century, early start-ups who positioned themselves in contrast to corporate America by challenging top-down models of management. Silicon Valley companies recognise that work is a fundamental component of a person’s life, their management philosophies enable the realisation of an employee’s full potential.
