Peggy Deamer

Letter — The New York Times

March 2, 2014

To the Editor:

“Monuments of Tech” (March 2) described how the headquarters design for Google, Facebook and Twitter mirrored those companies’ cultures. “Silicon Valley companies,” the article said, “are paying builders to fuse their values of speed, change and productivity with their perceived corporate smarts and quirkiness.”

But why was there hardly any mention of the architects who designed these structures and work spaces, or of the role that architecture plays in our evolving, overall cultural landscape? These buildings weren’t just extensions of company managers’ views.

While architects elsewhere may get plenty of exposure for their cost overruns or their seemingly self-serving claims to architecture history, the profession gets almost no credit for shaping our contemporary lives in nearly every space we occupy.