Open Platform: Treating weighty materials with a light hand, a local design team transforms a former warehouse into a communal workspace for cloud developers.
The cloud has an image problem. The term'which refers to the distributed networks of servers that store data and power all kinds of Internet services'gets tossed around a lot, but it doesn't evoke much beyond a vague nimbus of Amazon orders and MP3 files. So when James Lindenbaum, CEO of a communal workspace for cloud developers called Heavybit Industries, decided to set up shop in San Francisco's tech corridor, he needed an office that would convey the engineering muscle behind his members' software. 'We wanted a building that had a really heavy and serious look from the outside,' says Lindenbaum, who compares developing for the cloud to building the roads and laying the pipes that allow individual companies to operate. 'I didn't want this to feel theoretical when we go out and tell the world about it. There's a place where people do this thing. It's real.'
Heavybit operates like a residency program for nascent software-development companies, each of which spends nine months under the program's wing. Lindenbaum wanted an office that would encourage these young businesses to share ideas as they build their products, refine best practices, and pick up tips from Heavybit's speaker series. In early 2012 he enlisted Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott, principals of the San Francisco'based practice IwamotoScott Architecture, to renovate a converted warehouse he had leased in the city's South of Market district. That May the duo, who often introduce digital fabrication and design-build elements into their projects, set about transforming the three-level concrete-frame structure into a workshop for building the intangible infrastructure of the cloud.
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