Facebooks biggest move

In renovating its new headquarters in California,the company is going for collaborative,inclusive and just a little bit gritty

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Facebook,which started out in a dormitory at Harvard,transferred to a rented house in Silicon Valley and now occupies a cluster of office buildings in Palo Alto,California,is about to make its biggest move yet: to a 57-acre campus in this small city about 30 miles south of San Francisco. Construction workers are already swarming over the campus,a series of stucco-covered low-rise buildings occupied by Sun Microsystems until Sun was bought by the Oracle Corporation last year. Facebook plans to move in some employees by July and have most of its 2,000 workers,including its founder,Mark Zuckerberg,on site within 10 months. The campus will resemble an urban streetscape,with cafeterias by Roman and Williams,the New York design firm behind the Ace Hotel and its Breslin and John Dory restaurants.

But if the campus will be a microcosm of a city,its not clear that the real city around the campus including the largely Mexican-American neighborhood of Belle Haven will benefit from Facebooks presence. For one thing,the Facebook site is surrounded on three sides by water,and separated from the rest of Menlo Park by railroad tracks and a divided highway. The site is so insular that in the two decades it was occupied by Sun Microsystems it was nicknamed Sun Quentin (a reference to San Quentin prison,about 40 miles north). And because Facebook provides its employees with three meals a day in its own cafeterias,there may be little reason for them to venture off the property.

At Mi Tierra Linda,a Mexican food store on Willow Road (which dead-ends at the Facebook site),workers said they were not aware that Facebook was heading their way. But one customer,Freddy Bueno,24,said he knew the company was coming and hoped it would be good for local businesses. Facebook has a huge global presence, said the city manager of Menlo Park,Glen Rojas,who said he was optimistic that the company would attract other businesses to the city,which has a population of about 30,000. At the same time,he said,there is concern about how large a presence Facebook will become. Sun had 3,600 employees on site; Facebook,with a work force that is growing by 50 percent a year,could exceed that number,said John Tenanes,Facebooks director of global real estate.

In fact,because Suns engineers had private offices,while most Facebook employees work in unpartitioned spaces,Tenanes said the one million-square-foot campus could handle a much larger population than it was originally designed for. But Rojas said the site could legally accommodate only 3,600 workers,as determined by an environmental impact report. To exceed that number,Facebook will have to negotiate with Menlo Park,which will be looking for civic benefits in exchange,he said. Those could include street improvements,bicycle paths and payments in lieu of taxes. They can start moving in tomorrow, he said of Facebook. But they cant have more than 3,600 employees until they get City Council approval.

Rright now the focus is on getting the campus ready for Facebook employees. Contractors have already replaced rows of small offices in one of the Sun buildings with a loftlike space where desks will be pushed together in groups of four. We like that you can sit at one end and see all the way to the other, said Tenanes,showing off a section of building that had been stripped to concrete and ductwork and will remain that way. The San Francisco architecture firm Gensler is masterminding the renovation. Scott Dunlap,the Gensler principal running the project,said he was not thinking about making an architectural statement but about protecting Facebooks extraordinary company culture.

Tenanes said he was determined to employ small firms like Roman and Williams. He said he liked the casual eclectic look of the firms Ace Hotel after he stayed there on a recent trip. (The Ace crowd,which tends toward 20somethings with laptops,mirrors the Facebook employees demographic.) Unlike the Sun campus,with color-coordinated buildings reminiscent of an upscale resort,Facebook is looking for an urban streetscape where no one architect or designer dominates,Tenanes said. Random is good, he added.

Robin Standifer,a principal at Roman and Williams,said Facebook wanted there to be life and soul and some idiosyncrasy to the campus. They dont want to buy into that corporate structure, she said. They want to continue to feel hungry. Facebook workers will do a lot of moving between buildings. Right now the courtyard that connects them suggests a botanical garden,but that is going to change as Tenanes reduces the amount of vegetation on the site and adds more paths.