The dot-com city. Silicon valley urbanism

On their bland campuses, the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook dominate the world, removed from the mess and the prying eyes of the real city. But while their products are discussed endlessly, their urbanism has rarely been. So what does it look like? To date, the Silicon Valley campus has served as a backdrop to many a sun-kissed founder photoshoot, but there is little understanding of the distinctive urban personality that separates the village of Facebook from the town of Google, or the truly urban Twitter (which recently decided to move to San Francisco's notoriously un-gentrifiable Tenderloin). This investigation of the private towns of Silicon Valley examines the tech campus as a typology and attempts to discover what urban design says about companies we think we know.

Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, historian and teacher based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Dwell, Metropolis, Print, New York Magazine and the New York Times, and she blogs weekly on Design Observer. Princeton Architectural Press published her most recent book, Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, in 2012.