Facebook said on Friday it had hired renowned architect Frank Gehry to design the company’s campus expansion, which includes a new building with a rooftop garden.
“When it is completed, we hope it will provide a paradise workspace for the 3,400 engineers who will one day fill it,” a company statement said.
The expansion to the campus in Menlo Park, California, will be designed by the Canadian-born Gehry, known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, among others.
Photo: Reuters
Gehry, known for his deconstructive style and buildings that sometimes appear unfinished, also designed the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris.
“At every step of planning the new building, Frank has taken into account our engineering culture,” Facebook said. “It will be a large, one-room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects.”
The new building will include “cafes and lots of micro-kitchens with snacks so that you never have to go hungry,” the statement said.
“And we’ll fill the building with break-away spaces with couches and whiteboards to make getting away from your desk easy,” it said.
Facebook last year took over the headquarters of Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, moving from cramped headquarters in nearby Palo Alto.
The company seeks to break ground on the new building early next year, with hopes for “a quick construction.”
It said the exterior also “takes into account the local architecture” and that “a tonne” of trees would be planted on the grounds and on the rooftop garden.
“The raw, unfinished look of our buildings means we can construct them quickly and with a big emphasis on being eco-friendly,” Facebook said.
Facebook will maintain its current campus and use an underground tunnel to connect the two areas.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS