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When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My
by bkovitz 17y ago
When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My manager at Palm, who had grown up in Cupertino, said that Sunnyvale and Cupertino were "the two most boring towns in America".
Did they outside all beauty and culture to San Francisco? Or did they just not care?
- hernan7 17y agoSame here. My biggest whitebread shock was a couple of weeks after my arrival from Argentina. We went to have a coffe after dinner with a friend, and the Starbucks closed on us at 9:00PM! We ended up drinking our coffees in the parking lot. So much for the Silicon Valley bohemian life...
- kevbin 17y agoSilicon Valley does have some of the most beautiful, innovative office parks in the world. They're huge and isolated, however. Maybe the combination of strict zoning and ubiquitous automobiles aggregates retail into malls and strip malls, commercial into office parks, industrial into warehouse districts, etc.? Regardless, it's produced a grand, metropolitan brutalism of inhuman scale, navigable only by automobile, with the humane portions grandfathered-in between the cracks and targeted for extinction by city-planners, bureaucrats, and real estate developers.