Inside the walls: Facebook’s new home

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004, the company has occupied temporary, rented space. Now, for the first time, Facebook is its own landlord after moving into a new Menlo Park campus.

That means the social networking company, never shy about using its offices to broadcast its upstart hacker identity, is taking self-expression to a new level. From exposing structural steel girders, and offering them up for employee graffiti, to choosing bare plywood as the ceiling material over employee walkways, Facebook’s ongoing transformation of the button-down former Sun Microsystems campus is meant to telegraph that the company itself remains a work in progress.

"This is finished. Well, it’s actually unfinished," said Facebook real estate chief John Tenanes, pointing to permanent cutaway walls and ceilings as he gave this newspaper one of the first inside looks at Facebook’s new digs. "Because our job is never done. We’re only 1 percent of the journey. That’s what Mark’s mantra is: We’re only 1 percent" along in the changes Facebook hopes to bring to the Internet.

The aesthetics behind what will soon be Facebook’s first permanent home say much about the company’s corporate values and beliefs — including its sense of urgency.

By Mike Swift

Full Story: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19217500

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The World’s Coolest Offices

There’s an indoor skateboarding bowl, a converted railway station in Milan, a converted 1940s warehouse, and a tiny atelier open to the sky and earth in Japan. Which one is the coolest office in the world?

http://www.inc.com/worlds-coolest-offices