Until now, America's most glamorous tech companies have
largely been housed in suburban oases, velvet prisons that offer employees
endless supplies of vitamin water and protein bars, but require lengthy
commutes in company caravans from San Francisco to the cluttered highway strips
of Silicon Valley. There's plenty of interaction inside the bubble, but hardly
any with the wider world.
With its new 1,121-foot-tall loft building, designed by
Britain's Norman Foster, Comcast fashions a rebuttal to all that. Think of the
towering waterfall of glass that was unveiled Wednesday as a skyscraper version
of the great, light-filled factory lofts of the early 20th century, but wedged
into the unpredictable heart of Center City atop the region's densest transit
hub. In the six years since Comcast embedded itself in one of the city's more
straight-laced corporate towers, it has done a complete 180: Its second
high-rise should be a glorious vertical atelier where employees can make a mess
while they invent and build stuff.
In short, this is what the future of the growing Comcast
campus at 18th and Arch Streets will look like: Suits to the east, hipster
engineers in cutoffs and flip-flops to the west.
Yes, Foster & Partners' glass tower will be the tallest
building in Philadelphia when it opens in 2017, the eighth tallest in the
United States, the tallest building outside New York and Chicago. But its
height, surgically enhanced by the presence of a new Four Seasons hotel on the
top 12 floors, is hardly the most interesting thing about the $1.2 billion
mixed-use tower.
With this project, Comcast stands to reformulate the
architectural imagery of the technology industry. An urban icon for the wired
world has been long overdue. Foster's design promises to provide it.
There is a certain irony in Foster's involvement. He's the
same guy who is designing Apple's sprawling new headquarters on a 170-acre
suburban site in Cupertino, Calif., a low-slung, four-story ring that
reinforces the status quo. But Foster also has produced plenty of strong urban
buildings, including New York City's Hearst Tower. Comcast, he promises,
"is a way to bring a new kind of industry back into the heart of the
city."
It's not the shape of the Comcast building that is
particularly innovative. A stack of gradually narrowing glass boxes, the tower
will rise at mid-block from a podium on Arch Street, separated from the mother
ship by the domed Arch Street Presbyterian Church at the corner of 18th Street.
In form, Comcast's 59-story tower bears a strong resemblance to Foster's design
for Three World Trade Center, which is still unbuilt.
Aesthetic sensibility
What distinguishes the project, now being called the Comcast
Innovation and Technology Center, is the organization and aesthetic sensibility
of the interior spaces. The tower's simplicity is as potentially radical as
Walter Gropius' Fagus factory was in 1913, because it recognizes that urban
skyscrapers are not just for paper pushers, but also for collaboration and
creativity.
Foster's office has designed Comcast's tower with an unusual
off-center elevator core, located at a 19th Street corner. Ordinarily, offices
revolve around a central core that helps support the structure.
By pushing the elevator banks to one side, Foster creates a
large, column-free space that can be arranged and rearranged for any purpose.
Comcast plans to leave these high-ceilinged floors in a relatively raw state -
well, raw for a $60 billion company. The floors will be populated by about
3,000 software engineers, product designers, and other freewheeling types who
will adapt the space to their tastes.
All Foster buildings like to wear their structure on their
skin, and Comcast is no different. Here, Foster exploits the building's unusual
organization for decorative purposes by running the elevator banks up the
outside of the building. Glass cabs on the north side will be visible as they
travel.
The elevator banks also have been split into two sections,
with strips of glass marking the space between. Telescoping as they rise, the
towers will form a mast that terminates in a bladelike spire that feels almost
art deco. On the west side, Foster expresses the structure in a different way,
corseting the facade in a stainless steel ziggurat that will stiffen the
building, literally helping it stand up.
Eyeball to eyeball
The tower is placed so that it stares, eyeball to eyeball,
at Comcast's headquarters, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects. You should
be able to see right through the Foster building into the Stern tower. But
unlike Stern's slick obelisk, Foster's promises to be minutely detailed.
The north and south facades are divided into three-story
sections marked off by a rib of stainless steel. The purpose isn't only
aesthetic. Comcast sees each three-story module as a discreet neighborhood,
each with its own lounge.
All this is very nice for the people who will work there,
but what about the rest of us? Tech companies have become almost pathologically
private, and their ground floors are increasingly fortified. After taking over
a San Francisco office building recently, Google drove out the lone Starbucks.
Liberty Property Trust, Comcast's partner in developing the
Foster tower, as it was with the headquarters, vows to make the ground floor
welcoming to the public. On 18th Street, a winter garden will function much
like the one in the existing Comcast tower, with a small cafe and a more formal
restaurant at mid-block on Arch Street.
The real dazzler, Comcast hopes, will be a 35-foot-high,
all-glass penthouse at the top of the building, which will serve both as the
Four Seasons' lobby and a swank public lounge. On a clear day, you'll be able
to see the hotels in Atlantic City.
But given all the effort Comcast is making to shift the
imagery of the building from triumphal corporate trophy to creative loft in the
sky, it might be nice to include a more edgy public space. Perhaps an
auditorium or small theater. Without the opportunity for people to bring ideas
in from the outside, all those cool social spaces are just more bubbles.
Source: Philly.com
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