Facebook Campus

Through the design process of the first building, the team
arrived at the overall design concept for the entire
campus, bringing lessons from diverse urban
environments to what had been an isolated suburban
office park. Transforming an ornately landscaped English
Garden into a vibrant urban street and connecting
buildings with bridges and stairs to facilitate cross-
communication and constant movement, the team
engaged with the larger design community to bring a
variety of design voices to the project.

The design team understood that Facebook is more than
a technology company: it is a creative company. Instead
of corporate colors and official logos, the campus was
designed for its inhabitants to take ownership over their
space through artwork, installations, and the ability to
simply reconfigure their space. Employees are
encouraged to add their own personality to their space
and are helped along by a dynamic artist-in-residency
program where emerging artists are brought in to create
featured works that add dynamism to the workplace.
But the design work focused on much more than simply
creating a canvas for employee self-expression. The team
performed an in-depth investigation into a new model of
the high-performance workplace for Facebook’s
engineers, who are the core of the company. An open
environment while balancing small-group collaboration
and intense focus was the goal and the team delivered a
new space type that will allow for unprecedented team-
focused collaboration within and between engineering
groups.

This campus is built on the premise that innovation isn’t
driven by the amount of collaboration, but rather by the
quality of collaboration. And it’s this critical mix of
collaboration and focused work that distinguishes
companies like Facebook. Groups can innovate and
individuals can innovate; by providing for both, a
company like Facebook can accelerate innovation in ways
neither approach can do alone.