A few weeks ago we presented you photos from architectural offices that our readers shared through Facebook. And now, we bring to you the Facebook offices in Palo Alto, designed by Studio O+A.

Studio O+A is a San Francisco based practice, founded by Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander during the dot-com boom of the early 1990s, bringing quality design to start-ups and venture firms at Silicon Valley.

I wish ArchDaily was big enough to require such facilities… the interior space is amazing, specially the open working areas and several small meeting/working/relaxing spaces here and there, that reflect the spirit of collaboration inside Facebook.

Architect’s description and more photos after the break:

Employees of Facebook recently moved to a new headquarters that facilitates interaction and connection, reflecting the company’s mission as a social networking website provider. Formerly a laboratory facility for high-tech manufacturer Agilent Technologies, the 150,000-square-foot structure at Palo Alto’s Stanford Research Park brings together more than 700 employees originally scattered throughout 10 locations in and around downtown Palo Alto.

The design of the space relied heavily on input from the users, appropriate for a flatly structured company that weights every employee’s opinion equally. O+A designers interviewed employees about what they wanted from their new headquarters. The Facebook platform was used to conduct company-wide polls about design decisions, post construction photos and updates, and keep everyone informed of the thought process behind the project. An advisory board of employees from every department collaborated with the design team on the design process, from space planning to finishes to final move coordination.

Because the new facility houses employees coming from various locations, the company wanted to maintain each division’s distinct identity. The design takes its inspiration from the patchwork nature of Facebook users and employees, bringing together seemingly disparate elements to form a cohesive pattern and using color and interior spacing to create neighborhoods within the open plan space. The company’s executives sit in central areas, accessible to all employees. Large lounges and open spaces provide venues for the community to come together. A kitchen and café continue Facebook’s tradition of providing gourmet meals to staff at all hours, while drinks and snacks are available at micro-kitchens throughout the headquarters.

Reflecting employees’ desire for a green headquarters, the facility is the first commercial project completed under Palo Alto’s 2008 Green Building Ordinance, making extensive use of existing architectural features, recycling millwork from the original lab, and repurposing industrial components for post-industrial use. Other sustainable features include high recycled-content carpet and energy-efficient lighting.

The design goal for the new facility was to maintain the history and raw aesthetic of the building and create a fun dynamic appropriate for the company’s youthful staff. Many walls and spaces are left unfinished: employees are encouraged to write on the walls, add artwork, and move furniture as needed, allowing the building to evolve continuously.

A bright orange industrial crane, left over from the building’s previous user, was repurposed by San Francisco sculptor Oliver DiCicco to support a table surface from its heavyweight hoist, offering maximum maneuverability. Referencing the industrial aesthetic of the building, a felt canopy spreads up one wall and onto the ceiling, defining a central meeting area that can double as an impromptu auditorium. Mounted on threaded rods of varying length to achieve an undulating effect, the canopy absorbs sound and is penetrated at intervals by overhead lighting. An outdoor basketball court and indoor ping-pong table offer opportunities for recreation. And it is not unusual to see employees zipping along the concrete floors on two-wheeled skateboards.

As seen on ArchDaily

Architects: Irisarri + Piñera / Jesús Irisarri Castro & Guadalupe Piñera
Location: Pontevedra, Spain
Client: Colegio de Arquitectos de Galicia
Technical Architect: Sancho Páramo Cerqueira
Contractor: Varela Villamar
Master Builder: J. Manuel Pérez Boga
Project area: 1,980 sqm
Budget: 1,800,000 Euro
Project year: 2007-2009
Photographs: Manuel Gonzalez Vicente

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Temporary actions, ephemeral marks

Four constrictions for four freedoms

One capable solid

One maximum volumetric surrounding. We take it just as it is and affect it by the edge conditions chosen. This fact makes it transform in singular object, to which its abstraction contributes autonomy, staying ephemeral marks in its carving.

formal diagrams

One site to place

And the whole urban emptiness free for configure in harmony with the building. They make it united, like a part of a topography that passes flatly to surrounding. And with the whole choreography of accesses and attentive connections to the wealth of the urban trace, which solve in continuity diverse local heights, linking them both our building and others; organizing wheeled traffic, and creating stay zones, so that it turns out to be an urban unitary space without need of sidewalks, walls, etc.

Ephemeral of the constructions results demonstrated in it.

One ethical determining

Order where there must come together in a natural way the interests of the clients and the society with those of the architect. If there is a building where what today have passed to be mere topics of market (ecology, sostenibilidad, constructive experimentation, new matters, etc) make sense it’s here, but indeed. In the architects’ house, in which we have the obligation to foment the advance and the investigation. Independently of its current profitability, because of the didactic attitude that we must have towards the others, and for contributing to the effort of so many persons and companies, which open future ways to us..

The building will be capable of receiving temporarily and incorporating novel solutions along its life.

And it constructs here the building and its image, its meaningful appearance, the changeable condition of the society and the environment.

And without damage of a precise and forceful form.

One evolutionary programme

Very diverse activities, some of them more public than other, but that advise transparency and presence in a society that today doesn’t know us.

An space capable of continuous transformations in its use for a profession on the other hand accelerated. A system of external circulations, as trunk of tree, autonomous from the particular organizations of the space that it wraps and acclimatize, allowing autonomous functioning of the building parts and the annexation among them.

ephemeral moments diagrams

Visions of ephemeral moments in the building’s life.

In response to an evolutionary programme that tries to satisfy very diverse activities, some more public than different, and in which the capacity of adjustment and transformation in the time turns into an important factor, the building raises a organization capable of continuous transformations in its use.

The internal organization answers also to these criteria of flexibility, the minimal programme of the Central Office is distributed from a constant form in section, leaving cavities that, connected directly with the exterior circulation, can be used in an independent way and with different schedules, lodging also between both skins the spaces of relation and rest..

There has been looked a building that, fulfilling perfectly its functional objective, contributes the attainment of an environment with the maximum possible quality, so much in the interior as towards the exterior. On one hand seems to be desirable to demonstrate the presence of public, so important activity for the city, which in it is developed. On the other one, this transparency will allow to incorporate the building life and cultural offers into the civil activities that develop in the square, extending hereby its social dimension in an environment nowadays degraded.

With the objective to implant these concepts, it is thought a few translucent and transparent, light, materials of front, laminated panels consisted of glass and insulating polymers, which interior can include the systems of air conditioning and captation of energy in the search of meeting between technology and architecture as convergent concepts.

An architecture which image answers to the materialization of a way of energy management, emaciated and produced betting for the classic passive skills joined with the application of new technologies. And like in these “meetings” for that we look laboriously, this gives course to being fundamental part of the presence and essence of the building.

The application of new technologies materializes by means of the disposition in its south front and roof of a solar field of photovoltaic semitransparent cells to generate electric power by means of a system connected to the mains.

summer & winter diagrams

These cells will be integrated to the sheets forming the front as element that constructs its image and not as merely added. The use of different photovoltaic modules will be defined depending on the need to contribute diverse degrees of transparency or opaqueness to the front, by means of cold configuration (since the double glazing is provided by the interior skin) and changing the system of enclosing. So that they could do besides the function of solar protection, effect lattice, conceived as a set of clouds which density will change depending on the interior wished luminosity, trying to optimize the natural lighting in all the points of the building.

On the other hand the bioclimatic principle is based on the idea of the creation of one “microclimatic envelope” that is to say, of the surrounding translucent or transparent one that shelters the internal programme block. The protected landscape that conforms between these two skins, creates a semipublic space with climatic exceptional conditions, where it is possible to spend more time “outside” on an exterior having offered to the interior.

via ArchDaily