The future of the tech office is being shaped in Asia, not Silicon Valley

Out with the gimmicks and in with good design.

Over the last quarter century, the tech company office has become its own sub-genre of architecture. It’s the type of building that, whether through hubris or extreme wealth, eschews the buttoned-up standards of conventional offices. There are bright colors, playful work settings, plentiful social areas, and an abundance of extracurricular activities that range from game rooms to movie theaters to whiskey bars. From the dot com bubble of the late 1990s to the rise of Google and Facebook, the tech office steadily transformed into manifestations of a new kind of freewheeling capitalist philosophy of failing fast and scaling up, but making it all look like fun.