Anointed with a tree-topped roof garden—all the rage at Twitter—Frank Gehry (Guggenheim Museum, Walt Disney Concert Hall) will design Facebook's new 3,400-employee engineering office in Melo Park, Calif.
According to Everett Katigbak, Facebook's Environmental Design Manager, the new space will be open and airy while boasting "lots of micro-kitchens with snacks":
At every step of planning the new building, Frank has taken into account our engineering culture. It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects. There will be cafes and lots of micro-kitchens with snacks so that you never have to go hungry. And we’ll fill the building with break-away spaces with couches and whiteboards to make getting away from your desk easy.
And yes, it is gorgeous. Though we cannot yet decide if we prefer Twitter's new headquarters in San Francisco.
According to TechCrunch, "The news comes just a month after Facebook opened its first international engineering office in London. This joined Facebook’s 18 or so other international officies in Hyderabad, Tokyo, Auckland, and the international headquarters in Dublin."
The new Gehry-helmed project will break ground in early 2013 with hopes for a rapid construction. Facebook will keep their current campus at 1 Hacker Way (sigh), but will "use an underground tunnel to connect the two."