The RFP explicitly states that they prefer "Metropolitan areas with more than one million people", but that the site does not have to be "An urban or downtown campus".
Or a fourth option of not building an office for 12,000 people in a suburban area. It's literally across the street from single family homes and there is not a tall building anywhere close to the campus.
Did I miss something? I thought from the title of the article mentioning WHERE the campus would be built would be a fairly important detail to include.
Not too different from a large college campus (the U of MD was like this, with approximately the same number of people on campus).
It does put a damper on cross-group communication, but it's probably better than having a collection of skyscrapers. Also, Redmond doesn't like buildings more than 3 stories tall (their fire equipment can't deal -- why MS can't buy Redmond different fire equipment is beyond me).
Building a 50,000 person campus in the Boston area would be challenging and expensive. Areas that have the space are very, very pricey, and they're all outside the city. Public transportation is on the poorer side, and once you're out in suburbia many streets are too narrow to comfortably fit a bus, so the logistics just get harder.
They're staying near the domain area, which seems an incredibly reasonable. Relatively accessible via multiple freeways from population centers and the airport, close to many other tech campuses. Larger tech campuses optimize for those sorts of factors far more than where people want to hang out.
one thing the University of California system got right is that they put their campuses in large metropolitan areas, oftentimes in some of the most expensive real estate around. there really is no concept of 'townie' vs 'student' from what i saw.
> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.
Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.
A large college campus is 50-75k people. This is evidence that our towns can be human scale. A city is 10x to 100x that. I don’t think you can scale up the time that students spend walking by 10-100x and still be okay. You’re going to need some kind of wheeled transportation, and the layout might have to accommodate it in a way that a college campus with purely walkable trips doesn’t.
it's not easy to grow the UCSC campus like that. There was an aggressive 25 year plan where they anticipated a campus multiple times the current size but it's not realistic to expect the town to accomodate it. It would also be super-unpopular to extensively develop the existing campus.
How the hell there isn't a giant apartment complex mandated, rather than forbidden, as part of these big tech company campuses is something I've scratched my head on.
My best theory is that having to sing "Sixteen Tons" day after day in music classes has forever vilified anything approaching the idea of a company town...
It's not really stated explicitly but it mostly boils down to wanting to have the benefits of the place being a college town without too many of the inconveniences of the place being a college town.
> an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
> Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate.
I've been wondering how these huge companies with town-sized campuses, and all of that capital investment would respond. I guess it would take a really special kind of company to recognize that these campuses are a sunk cost and pivot to true remote.
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