Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work
If the Valley has a premise these days, it is that anything is possible—as long as there are generous resources and no interventions from outside.
.. Inside, it is about turning Google into not only a life style but a fully realized life. Like the current Googleplex, the new campus would employ open floor plans. The glass canopy skins, the proposed site’s most distinctive feature, would eliminate the need for normal walls, opening the campus to the world outside while sealing it from unwanted elements.
.. In its design, Google hoped to create a self-sufficient world where, literally and figuratively, the rain could never fall.
.. It’s less clear how tech giants are served by campuses that tune out the outside world. When organized monasticism took root with the Buddhists, in the fourth century B.C., it was the result not of religious insularity but of secular wealth.