A drone lifts off from the Junipero Serra Freeway, closing in on a futuristic glass ring, lined with oak trees. Cutting through the building’s transparent façade – its inner workings splayed out like an infinite cross-section – it picks up the pace on a young woman as she races through the sprawling central garden. Clusters of fruit trees, rolling wild meadows, a manicured sports pitch and gigantic ripple pool dot the 175 acre expanse. Suspended in dreamy Californian sunlight, the scene is both primordial and hyper-futuristic; the landscape is a seamless marriage of nature and technology. Welcome to the Garden of Steve.

When this commercial was released in 2018, the $5b, 2.8 million-square-foot megalith known as Apple Park – conceived by the late company founder Steve Jobs with British architecture office Foster & Partners – had been open to employees for over a year. This video, the only official documentation of the project released by Apple, dials up the accusations of cultish insularity raised a year prior. Though Apple Park is 80% landscape, this bad press centered overwhelmingly on its architecture – partly because no journalist had actually been inside what quickly became known as ‘the mothership.’ The sheer monumentality of the ring-shaped building – an embodiment of the navel-gazing stereotype of Silicon Valley culture – was, no doubt, an easy target. But what about the pre-tech idyll taking root in the building’s center?

‘The campuses are less a starchitect-designed vision of power,’ argues Claudia Dutson, a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, ‘than Big Tech working in a very hands-on and collaborative way to become the architects of their own worlds.’

‘There’s a long cultural history of the lone genius leaving behind city luddites to build a new world freed from societal, political, and economic regulation,’ suggests Charles Waldheim, Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. ‘You can clearly map that desire onto Silicon Valley campuses, where landscape architects are hired to build a verdant imaginary that looks like it’s always been there.’ While the types of pastoral oases envisioned by Silicon Valley come from a very high-tech, very Californian strain of neo-Thoreauism,[1] they have more mundane roots in the American postwar corporate campus movement.

When Jobs approached landscape architect Laurie Olin to design the green campus of Apple Park, the inventor had two references in mind: the sweeping Main Quad of Stanford University, and the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th century landscape architect behind Central Park. These points of influence reveal the symbolic and aesthetic function of Apple Park: it shrouds the company from public eye and, at the same time, acts as a self-contained world for the company to bask in its own origin story and affirm its place in California’s ecology through a cinematic simulation of nature.

More than a nod to the intellectual beacon of his native Palo Alto, Jobs’s riff on Stanford draws on the cultural capital of elite private schools, which carry a kind of ‘environmental prestige and independent intellectual inquiry supposedly free from corporate constraint.’[2] In other words, every American tech company’s dream. Olmsted, for his part, understood the power of landscape as symbolic gesture. For him, the landscape was a canvas upon which to ‘paint’ nature so to heighten the senses – a practice far less concerned with reproducing the natural world than generating a sense of the spectacular.

15 miles north, three gigantic grey canopies are scattered across the sprawling sun-burnt expanse of Mountain View. Looking like drab rain-soaked tents at Glastonbury, it’s hard to believe this is the result of the multi-billion-dollar eco-futuristic utopia conceived for Google by Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studios.

The original design for Google HQ was a four plot, 3m ft2 high-tech pastoral oasis. Greenhouses, indoor running tracks, and community tai-chi were sprinkled around the glimmering renderings, promising the 60s modular dream of Archigram rehashed by two of Burning Man’s favorite architects. In reality, Google’s first self-built office provides a comparatively paltry 1m ft2 of space inside an airport hangar-like roof. To compensate for this downgrade, Google’s HQ features a ‘green loop’ walking trail that runs through the building.

‘The green loop gives the public peek-a-boos into the building,’ beams Mary Margaret Jones, President and CEO of Hargreaves Jones Architects, the firm behind Google HQ’s landscaping. ‘From courtyards to boardroom meetings, you can witness a village of activity underneath the building’s solar-harvesting penetrable canopy.’

Study any Silicon Valley tech campus and you’ll notice some recurring themes. The first is an unfounded obsession with public voyeurism, often realized through glass facades butting up streetside and ‘public plazas’ running through the landscaping. (This is the norm in an industry that sees no difference between transparent buildings and actual corporate accountability.) The second is a rehashing of the modernist fantasy of blurring indoor and outdoor space. In the high-tech green symbolism of Big Tech, this manifests through biophilic design – buildings loaded up with green walls and stuffed with indoor jungles

The gesture of a symbiosis with nature extends further into the campus superstructures: it’s a kind of metaphorical architecture with a solarpunk finish. Streamlined buildings shaped like clovers, buttercups, and bubbles sprout flashy photovoltaic panels and rainwater harvesting hardware. In a late capitalist era characterized by corporate greenwashing, Silicon Valley’s new campus uses craftmanship, community, and technology to signal sustainability rather than perform it.

Across these new headquarters, various initiatives to resurrect ecological histories manifest in the planting of wild oak forests, the construction of burrowing owl habitats, or even recreating the topography of the region before it was settled by mankind. The architectural language is fluid; this subtle gesture of world-making folds seamlessly into the running tracks, company-owned food truck courtyards, 40-foot-tall-redwood-lined ‘public squares,’ and other gentrified neighborly perks to enable a very particular idea of public space.

Of course, this projection doesn’t quite chalk up with the reality of the companies’ actions. This May, Google incited the rage of the local council when it proposed building two transit bridges crossing over the local bioreserve of Stevens Creek Trail in Mountain View, so its 23,000 employees could bypass the perpetually-clogged adjacent highway. Three years ago, Apple faced a similar row in Cupertino.[3] More pressing still is the billions that Big Tech routinely invests in unsustainable manufacturing practices, including the mining of rare earth elements for products and cloud-computing technologies.

The pastoral techno-utopias of Big Tech are far easier to critique than where we’re headed next. The last few years have seen Silicon Valley’s insidious creep into the urban realm: Amazon now owns an estimated 20% of real estate in Seattle; ousted from Berlin in late 2018, Google’s £1b ‘landscraper’ (a 330m cross between a cruise ship and a prison, plus a green roof) is well underway in London’s Kings Cross; meanwhile, Facebook is developing its very own neighbourhood, Willow Campus, next to its Menlo Park HQ. As cities grow increasingly privatized and Big Tech endeavors ‘to have its urban utopia in spite of itself,’ as Waldheim suggests, Silicon Valley’s true reach can no longer be contained in the bucolic palaces of Southern California. We must follow the lead of Berlin’s protesters in rejecting Big Tech’s encroach upon the urban commons, so that Silicon Valley’s high-tech green magic doesn’t become our collective nightmare.