Through a close reading and genealogy of three ‘Big Tech’ corporations’ headquarters: Apple, Google (Alphabet), and Facebook (Meta Platforms), this thesis examines the role that architecture plays in a contradictory task: the incorporation of a specific figure who is necessary for their continuous venturing into ‘unknown’ fields of economic expansion, a figure continually uprooted and independent, the engineer-hacker, or ‘pioneer.’ Built concurrently over the past decade in neighbouring cities in the area of Northern California known as Silicon Valley, these buildings mark a critical turning point. For the first time, corporations whose primary focus had been the digital turned to Architecture to create a cohesive representation of their ethos and their most central sites for the highly competitive and intensive process of driving, at an accelerating speed, the innovation of ever-more aspirational and user-empowering applications, services, websites, hardware, software and wearable devices, or the design of their platforms. The resulting buildings, now some of the most recognisable in the world, ended up as starkly different from each other: Apple Park, a giant doughnut-shaped glass building hovering over a ‘Californian’ landscape; Google’s Charleston East, a tent-like structure covering a freestanding office platform organised around courtyards, and Facebook’s MPK20, an impossibly large hacker-artist’s loft, with no internal subdivisions but a rooftop parkland above. What is critical about their form is what these buildings share in common: the marriage of two diametrically opposed conditions. The first is actuated and indexed by the figure of the central void – a distinct, clear, and legible form with limits, and the other by what I will refer to as the ‘endless interior’ vast expanses of interior space designed to be endlessly reconfigured. But, as the thesis will demonstrate, this strategic marriage of opposites to yoke the pioneer is nothing new. Historically, Silicon Valley, and California itself, have been the site of several important and pivotal architectures that cast new light on the mechanics of the architecture of Big Tech capitalism. Ultimately, what the architecture of these headquarters, and the labour subjectivity they produce, make legible is that the unfolding of an endless frontier in the interior mirrors a parallel drive towards an endlessly expanding outward colonisation of user.

Funder: The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Haworth UK