Photo: Capture Light / Shutterstock

The 52-story, 799-foot-tall office building at 555 California Street in San Francisco doesn't look like a tech office. It was built in the 1960s as the world headquarters of Bank of America, and is the kind of majestic, spare-no-expense skyscraper that reflected a growing country's mid-century ambitions. The structure's architectural heft, as well as its central location in San Francisco's financial district, is what's caused big banks and law firms to flock there over the years — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and UBS are just a few of the corporate tenants who have paid a premium to be in a building with upscale amenities, 24/7 security, and a Starbucks on the ground floor that opens at 4 a.m., so that traders working New York hours can get their pre-market caffeine fix.

Today, a different kind of company is moving in to 555 California Street, and to other old-line luxury office buildings across the city. Huge tech firms like Microsoft and LinkedIn are spreading out — and up — to large plots of San Francisco commercial real estate, and the tech industry, which once took pride in its sprawling suburban campuses, is looking more urban than ever.

Silicon Valley was once the spatial home of tech. If you wanted to set up a new start-up or expand an existing one, you called up a real-estate broker and leased an office in Mountain View, Menlo Park, San Jose, or one of the other cities 30-ish miles south of San Francisco, where space was plentiful and rates were relatively cheap. There were some pretty campuses in Silicon Valley — the Googleplex sparked a wave of colorful, perk-filled imitators — but many tech firms lived in one of hundreds of boring, nondescript office parks along the Route 101 corridor.

These days, tech companies are increasingly setting up shop in San Francisco itself, and shelling out for unconventional office spaces with design quirks and a faux-rustic look. Partly, this is a HR move — many of their current and potential workers are San Francisco residents who enjoy the city's nightlife, restaurants, and public transportation, and don't want to waste upwards of two hours a day commuting to the South Bay (no matter how tricked-out the corporate shuttle is). And partly it's because cities are on the rise all over the world — the great urban migration of the coming decades is going to bring many formerly urban industries out of their low-slung suburban offices and back into skyscrapers and parking garages — and tech wants to be where the action is.....Continue Reading

> via nymag.com