From Apple to Amazon: The New Monuments to Digital Domination

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/tech-giants-like-apple-and-amazon-building-monuments-to-digital-domination-a-936095.html



Technology giants in the United States are building bombastic new headquarters to immortalize their grandiose ambitions, while inside they plan to turn traditional office culture on its head.

From Apple to Amazon: The New Monuments to Digital Domination
By Thomas Schulz in San Francisco
November 29, 2013 – 05:30 PM

A few weeks before his death, Steve Jobs commissioned one last marvel of ingenuity. He knew that it would be his legacy, a symbol of his work and an expression of creative global supremacy: a new headquarters for Apple, designed by British star architect Sir Norman Foster. "The best office building in the world," Jobs called it when he first revealed the plans, "a little like a spaceship."

It will also probably be the most expensive company headquarters in the world, a gigantic, circular monolith with an estimated price tag of $5 billion (€3.7 billion), eclipsing even the cost of rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York, which has been under construction for the past 10 years.

But nothing that Apple does these days goes unchallenged for long, especially when it comes to symbols.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, whose vision is to network all of mankind online, has commissioned the equally famous architect Frank Gehry to create a new headquarters for his company. Of course this is not just any building. It's "the largest open office space in the world," as Zuckerberg says, an enormous room for 3,400 Facebook employees. The building itself will be covered with trees and meadows, allowing it to merge with the landscape. "From the outside it will appear as if you're looking at a hill in nature," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook timeline.