Frank Gehry Is Designing Facebook’s New Office Building And That’s Sad

[cali]

Frank Gehry, the genius architect who designed the Wall Disney Concert Hall or the curve perverted one-trick pony who litters beautiful cities with Toontown buildings because he can’t draw a straight line anymore (depending on your perspective), is going to be designing Facebook’s new engineering office building. You don’t even need to know architecture to know Gehry, he’s an icon. This is a good thing because it proves Facebook has taste. But a horrible thing because its taste is so generically terrible.

Look, having Gehry design your building isn’t the worst thing in the world. He’s done some great work, he’s one of the most famous architects ever and people really “like” his stuff. Screw the vanilla boxes! Let’s live in a world on mushrooms. But just because someone with a big name decides to design deranged buildings inspired by the aftermath of a Michael Bay movie, it doesn’t mean you have to like them. Or that they’re any good.

Saying Gehry designs “awesome” buildings is easy. His designs are so different (from the norm, not each other) that they force you to comment. But the young and scrappy Facebook — the one who gave David Choe FB stock for tagging up its walls — probably wouldn’t have done this (they couldn’t have afforded it, first of all) because it’s just so damn typical of a big public company trying to fake cool. Asking Gehry to design their latest building is the classic no-taste-masked-as-taste, socially accepted anti-establishment move.

Here’s what the building looks like. In the middle of Menlo Park, where Gehry doesn’t exactly have to tango with historic buildings and mind a cityscape, it doesn’t look half bad. It looks carefully restrained and not like steel and glass vomit. Trees on the roof! So green! Here’s what Facebook has to say:

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http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/08/frank-gehry-is-designing-facebooks-new-office-building-and-thats-sad/

It's going to be a ten acre open space, but what I find interesting is that they're building it in the midst of the stock meltdown.

[Berlum]

1. Facebook is doing a massive face plant

[Cooley Hurd]

2. The stock prices were grossly over-inflated to begin with...

My tech-stock-savvy friends were all over it at the IPO. And they all lost $$$. They shook it off, saying, "Facebook isn't going anywhere." I responded with two words: "My Space."

I think a new Gehry-designed building in the world is a good thing. Whether it has Facebook's logo on it isn't relevant, since the building will persist long after Facebook is gone.

[trumad]

3. Disagree with the "My Space" comment

Every single kid I know uses Facebook religiously.

[Cooley Hurd]

5. ...as they used to use MySpace.

My point was, to my friend who said FB would be around for a long time, that FB is subject to the same trends that any other social site experiences. All it would take is a new site to come around that would render FB obsolete.

[frazzled]

4. Gee, they said the same thing when ...

Johnson's Wax asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design their headquarters in Racine, in the waning years of the Depression.

What, would this writer have been happier with Diller + Scofidio, or what?

[part man all 86]

6. When facebook's users totals are finally tallied, we will find out that it is around 600 people

with 10 million accounts.

[Bluenorthwest]

7. Gehry has made all sorts of buildings, not all of them are like Disney Hall....

I used to use the Gehry designed Hollywood Branch Library a lot, and it was a nice functional space.