The World's Most Spectacular Offices

From California to London, the tech giants are employing top architects to build spectacular symbols of their immense global power. But these edifices have their critics, says Rowan Moore

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We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon. Until we chance on the bars of the playpen and find that there are places we can’t go, and that it is in the gift of the grown-ups on the other side to set the limits to our freedom. We’re talking here of virtual space. But those grown-ups, the tech giants, are also in the business of building physical billiondollar enclaves for their thousands of employees. Here too they create calibrated lands of fun, wherein staff offer their lives, body and soul, day and night, in return for gyms, Olympic-sized pools, climbing walls, basketball courts, hiking trails, massage rooms and hanging gardens, performance venues, amiable art and lovable graphics. They’ve been doing this for a while – what is changing is the scale and extravagance of these places. For the tech giants are now in the same position as great powers in the past – the bankers of the Italian Renaissance, the skyscraper builders of the 20th century, Victorian railway companies – whereby their size and wealth find expression in spectacular architecture.