Building Silicon Valley. Corporate Architecture, Information Technology and Mass Culture in the Digital Age

Lina Malfona

doi:10.6092/issn.2611-0075/9662

Authors

Lina Malfona Associate professor in architecture DESTeC Department, University of Pisa

Lina Malfona (1980), an architect and a scholar with a Ph.D. in Architectural and Urban Design, studied at Sapienza University of Rome under Franco Purini, with whom she worked from 2005 to 2012. Since 2008, she has been both teaching as a visiting professor in Architectural Design Core Studios and working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome and Cornell University GSAPP (Ithaca, NY). Malfona has been guest and visiting critic at Columbia University GSAPP, Cornell AAP, ENSA Paris Belleville, Harvard GSD, RISD, Politecnico di Milano and Syracuse University, among others. In 2018, she has been appointed Associate Professor in Architectural Design at the University of Pisa.
Lina Malfona has pursued her research thanks to a number of prestigious post-doctoral research fellowships, among which a Fulbright Grant as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In 2017-18 she carried out her research thanks to the CCA Visiting Scholarship (Montréal, Canada) and the Library Grant from The J. Paul Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, US), while in 2015, she was awarded a grant as Visiting Fellow at the ATCH Center at the School of Architecture, The University of Queensland.
As a scholar, Malfona authored a number of essays and monographs on matters related to the history, theory and criticism of architecture, focusing on the relationship between architectural form and urban space. Over time, she analyzed the form of the city as a critical and political device for social and architectural innovation, and recently she is working on the impact of the digital revolution on architectural and urban design, theory, and critique. Among her books, Il tracciato Urbano (2012); Tra Roma e il Mare (2014); Building the Landscape (2018) and Antonio Sant’Elia. Il Manifesto dell’Architettura Futurista (edited with Franco Purini). Her writings have been published through Il Poligrafo, Gangemi, Quodlibet, and in Ananke, Anfione e Zeto, Ardeth, The Avery Review, PLOT and Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica, among others.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-0075/9662

Keywords:

Mass Culture, Information Technology, Corporation, Creative Work, Campus

Abstract

The examination of the greatest technopolis in the world is a way of exploring how an architectural as well as cultural, economic, and urban—or better, suburban—phenomenon, linked to a specific framework, has affected an international context. By studying Silicon Valley’s phases of development, from its period of militarization during the Cold War to the era of counterculture and then of cyberculture, we can reread the history of information technology’s centers of production that have contributed to broadcast the Valley’s architectural and political image. Starting from the headquarters of Varian Associates—designed by Erich Mendelsohn and erected in Stanford Industrial Park in 1951 —and moving through the campuses that consolidated the image of creativity for which Silicon Valley became well-known in the Eighties, we will be able to have a retrospective look at the physical as well as virtual organization of the first IT corporations which supported the rising of the most powerful medium, the internet. This paper’s origin point is the examination of three texts written by the historian Reyner Banham between 1980 and 1987, and in particular the essay “La fine della Silicon Valley” [The end of Silicon Valley], published only in Italian in Casabella. References to facts, considerations, and events, taken from Banham’s texts, pepper this study like a parallel story that problematizes this area, highlighting both its technological heroism and its approaching demise.

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References

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Building Silicon Valley. Corporate Architecture, Information Technology and Mass Culture in the Digital Age

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