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R E C E N T L Y

Pictures from an exhibition
By Scott Rosenberg
With the Smithsonian's new Web site, getting around is half the fun
(03/25/98)

Please, Mr. Postman?
By Andrew Leonard
Netscape's and Microsoft's software just don't get along -- and God help anyone who tries to get them to make up and be nice
(03/24/98)

21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Bright ideas for techno-schools
(03/23/98)

Mutiny on the Net
By Andrew Leonard
Music pirates cross swords with the recording industry
(03/20/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
As Slate goes, so goes ... Slate
(03/19/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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If Florence was the foremost of European Renaissance cities, its Silicon Valley equivalent is probably Palo Alto. It's a city full to bursting with rich, ambitious, highly educated innovators possessed of a burning desire to start new businesses that will change the world. Renaissance people, surely?

In Florence's glory years, its inhabitants were constantly rebuilding the city -- and the same is true of Palo Alto today. But where the Florentine boom resulted in architecture of world renown, the buildings that are mushrooming around Palo Alto today are almost universally reviled. Indeed, local unease over how the city is being developed has resulted in a bitter and long-running fight between developers and preservationists over the demolition of old homes. Significantly, it's a fight in which even the developers aren't bothering to argue the architectural merits of the homes they want to build.

First laid out in 1887 at the behest of Leland Stanford, Palo Alto was intended to service the university that Stanford was building in memory of his young son (who'd died visiting the typhoid-ridden hot spots of the Italian Renaissance on the 19th century Grand Tour). As the university and the industries that grew up in its shadow have prospered, so has Palo Alto. It is a city with fine schools, a relatively enlightened government and a cosmopolitan but safe downtown. No surprise, then, that it's become one of the most sought-after locations for Silicon Valley's venture capitalists, engineers and CEOs to make their home.

The city's attractiveness to the sort of person who can lay down a million dollars cash for a house is what's precipitated the fight over new homes. As land has become scarce, people have been tearing down existing homes, whatever their merits, and building large new properties in their place. Preservationists, alarmed at the speed at which a significant percentage of the city's old buildings were being destroyed, successfully called for an effective moratorium on the demolition of all pre-1940 buildings. This has enraged many owners of old houses, who believe they have the right to build whatever they please on their land.

So far the debate has been limited to which counts more, the aesthetic (and historical) loss to the city or the private owners' loss of their property rights. Fascinatingly, both sides in the debate do seem to agree on one thing: It's impossible to build new houses of greater aesthetic worth than the ones that they replace.

If you look at the new buildings that are replacing the old, you can understand why. Proponents of the demolition ban call the enormous mock-Spanish Colonial mansions that are being squeezed into lots in their neighborhoods Taco Bell monsters. It's a fair description. And those that aren't Spanish or Mission revival pastiches are Tudor or Neo-Classical or French Country. American domestic architecture has a noble tradition of revivalism (think Jefferson's Monticello). But most new domestic buildings in Silicon Valley are bloated warehouses that gesture only halfheartedly toward their chosen style.

Palo Alto is far from the only municipality in the nation to be split by a fight over "monster" homes. But it's perhaps surprising to find such little faith in the new, and such a completely conventional vision of what the new can be, among people who fancy themselves to be leading a new Renaissance.

This pattern of domestic building is mirrored across Silicon Valley -- the entire area has become a vast estate of swollen tract homes, each of which lacks the ambition to impress by anything other than scale. And the same trend is evident in the Valley's commercial and institutional architecture. While preservationists are getting exercised over threatened, or at least unprotected, "historic" commercial buildings, the new ones being built are nothing to write home about.

While the Valley is far from blighted, it has almost no commercial, institutional or domestic building that can be called world-class. Most corporate headquarters here are derivative glass boxes. When these buildings do have character, it's not always admirable: Inmates at Sun Microsystems' prisonlike headquarters in Palo Alto lovingly refer to it as "Sun Quentin." No building raised in the Valley in the last five years rivals Frank Gehry's new Guggenheim in Bilbao, or Norman Foster's Hong Kong headquarters for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. There is nothing even in the now-establishment haute modernist style of a quality, let alone a scale, to rival Richard Meier's new Getty in L.A. A few Valley buildings, like Studios Architecture's recent new headquarters for Silicon Graphics, are both adventurous and successful. But a couple of examples amid so much mediocrity does not an architectural Renaissance make.

This situation extends beyond just architecture. The majority of the wealthy, successful and entrepreneurial leaders of the Valley support very little but conventional art, interior design, theater, film and music.

The Valley is certainly not a cultural wasteland -- although galleries have a hard time affording their rents, and four of the seven art-house cinemas Palo Alto had 15 years ago are closed. The region has its museums, its theaters and a vibrant crafts subculture, and it gets the national tours of first-rate classical and rock performers. But it has no more of these amenities than most other American urban areas. And again, for a region of such enormous wealth and high profile, surprisingly little of what art the Valley originates itself can make any claim to world -- or even national -- attention.

N E X T_P A G E .|. The cultural stranglehold of Silicon Valley's money myths