Through the design process of the first building, the team arrived at the overall design concept for the entire campus, bringing lessons from diverse urban environments to what had been an isolated suburban office park. Transforming an ornately landscaped English Garden into a vibrant urban street and connecting buildings with bridges and stairs to facilitate cross-communication and constant movement, the team engaged with the larger design community to bring a variety of design voices to the project.
The design team understood that Facebook is more than a technology company: it is a creative company. Instead of corporate colors and official logos, the campus was designed for its inhabitants to take ownership over their space through artwork, installations, and the ability to simply reconfigure their space. Employees are encouraged to add their own personality to their space and are helped along by a dynamic artist-in-residency program where emerging artists are brought in to create featured works that add dynamism to the workplace.
But the design work focused on much more than simply creating a canvas for employee self-expression. The team performed an in-depth investigation into a new model of the high-performance workplace for Facebook’s engineers, who are the core of the company. An open environment while balancing small-group collaboration and intense focus was the goal and the team delivered a new space type that will allow for unprecedented team-focused collaboration within and between engineering groups.
This campus is built on the premise that innovation isn’t driven by the amount of collaboration, but rather by the quality of collaboration. And it’s this critical mix of collaboration and focused work that distinguishes companies like Facebook. Groups can innovate and individuals can innovate; by providing for both, a company like Facebook can accelerate innovation in ways neither approach can do alone.
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