- Platform Cities
Early results are mixed. Cloud companies building smart cities and key architects designing enclaves for Cloud companies might together point us toward that ark or to something more interesting if less recognizable. <sup>54</sup> They may provide some additional clues for the design brief, both by what they get right and what they get wrong. It is in this context that we can also tally how global Cloud platforms choose to express their terrestrial presence through the medium of architecture on the City layer, not only by marking the imprint of their subterranean data centers but also by a close reading of the new megastructural headquarters built to house the embodied human intelligence of particular Cloud corporations in Silicon Valley, California. By comparison, recall the Chrysler Building on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City, designed by William Van Alen for Mr. Chrysler himself in the late 1920s, as exemplary of an older contiguous and self-contained organizational body. The preponderance of a company ’ s executive staff coinhabited a vertical castle, summoned into a singular, internalized corporate hierarchy, modeled in the stacked floors and rigid posture of the tower. <sup>55</sup> In his ponderous film Cremaster 3 (2002), Matthew Barney takes on the construction of the Chrysler Building as an occult epicenter of bygone symbolic economies of industrial power, old money, and organic class hierarchy. The conspiratorial conflict involves “ the architect, ” an “ entered apprentice, ” and some other stuff related to Masonic lore and the grandiloquent opacity of deep wealth. Now in considering, for example, the Googleplex in Mountain View, or the proposed new Apple headquarters in Cupertino, we might well wonder (and shudder) if some future Matthew Barney will dance through their hallways with similarly reverent obsequiousness? Do the old and the new headquarters even traffic with the same denominations of spirit and cash? The answer leads mostly to other questions. Below, then, and to conclude our discussion of this layer, is a bit of architectural phrenology and corporate-scale palm reading (or at least one biased interpretation of platform models replicated as organizational space and form) of current headquarters plans understood as an expression of the Cloud layer into the City.
City Layer
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