Take a first look inside Mark Zuckerberg’s gargantuan new office designed by Frank Gehry, which has a real-life Facebook wall, a rollerblade fun park and a Why Room. Oh the fun they must have

A big blue thumbs-up sign stands at the entrance to 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, California, signalling the home of the biggest social network in the world. It is an appropriately oversized symbol of positivity for a website that began just 11 years ago, but whose membership now comprises one-fifth of the entire global population, having monetised friendship into a business worth more than $200bn. Now, across the highway, stands Facebook’s latest superlative: the mother of all office park sheds, said to contain “the largest open floor plan in the world”, designed by globe-trotting titanium-crumpling starchitect, Frank Gehry.

“Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post last week, as his staff began moving into the new hangar-like HQ. Reached by a tunnel that runs under the six-lane Bayfront Expressway from the existing headquarters, 1 Facebook Way (aka MPK20) is a gargantuan sprawling mass, rambling across an area of 430,000 sq ft (40,000 sq m), or around five and a half football pitches, jacked up above a ground-level car park and topped with a park on the roof. It is conceived as a series of big boxes jammed together at rakish angles, dipping and diving from 14 to 22 metres in height as it stretches along the highway. It looks as if, after some cataclysmic tectonic tremor, every commercial shed alongside the expressway had piled up in a great collision.

Inside, it’s a hymn to the open-plan bürolandschaft, the “office landscape” ideal dreamed up in 1950s Germany as a break from the hierarchical world of executives hidden behind closed doors. In a wave of postwar optimism, everyone would work together on clusters of desks scattered across undivided floor-plates. It was to be a world of freeform team-working environments, punctuated only by pot plants and partitions. In reality, it set the mould for the dreary expanses of carpet tiles and suspended ceilings that have proliferated ever since; research has also suggested that open offices “make people less productive and more hostile and anxious”. So, in the hands of Gehry and a multi-billion dollar client, can the open-plan office be reinvented?

“The building itself is pretty simple and isn’t fancy,” writes Zuckerberg. “That’s on purpose. We want our space to feel like a work in progress. When you enter our buildings, we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world.” The unfinished look, with exposed services and dangling wires, is deployed not to reveal the building’s workings, but as a metaphor for the work still left to do on the journey to global domination.

Gehry, meanwhile, is at pains to point out this isn’t his usual brand of billowing architectural tricks. Instead, it is a big-box warehouse built from off-the-peg components, which feels like a welcome return to the rough-and-ready style that launched his career in the 1970s. It is a far cry from the eye-wateringly expensive museums he has built recently, with their double-curved glass sails hanging as monuments to their patron’s vanity. Instead it is a robust shell to be appropriated and modified over time – or, as Facebookers would have it, “hacked”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burolandschaft reborn? … A model of Frank Gehry’s new Facebook HQ, on display inside the new Facebook HQ. Photograph: Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook

“It is not a grand design statement,” says Gehry. “From the start, Mark wanted a space that was unassuming, matter-of-fact and cost effective. He did not want it overly designed. It also had to be flexible to respond to the ever-changing nature of his business; one that facilitated collaboration and one that did not impose itself on their open and transparent culture.”

It is a low-key, loose-fit architectural attitude that is distinctly at odds with many of the other west coast tech companies’ sleeker ambitions. Apple is busy building a flying saucer in Cupertino, a precision-engineered doughnut designed by Norman Foster that is being constructed with the same level of accuracy as one of its products – and is already $2bn over its $3bn budget as a result. Samsung is close to completing its palatial glass box in San Jose, Amazon is planning to bestow Seattle with a cluster of jungle-filled biospheres, while Google is reviving the 1970s dream of sweeping the world beneath an undulating transparent tent.

But Zuck just wanted a big cheap play-shed. Indeed, he initially sent Gehry packing, fearing the master of manipulating metal cladding “would be very expensive and that would send the wrong signal about our culture”. In the end, he is proud to say the building was completed “ahead of schedule and under budget … [and] ended up costing us much less than any other major developments planned in Silicon Valley and taking way less time to build.”

And it’s just the first step of a much bigger plan. The company is already forging ahead with the next project, for almost a million square feet of office space in two new buildings nearby, announced this week, along with a private community for 10,000 employees on 200 acres, all designed by Gehry – dubbed Zee-Town.

The empire expands … Facebook has just submitted plans for two more gargantuan buildings next door, also by Gehry, with a floor area of 980,000 square feet (completed HQ shown to the right). Photograph: Nathan Donato-Weinstein/Silicon Valley Business Journal

So does this first mega-building succeed in Zuckerberg’s ambition “to create the same sense of community and connection among our teams that we try to enable with our services across the world”?

Sadly it is a sense of community and connection that doesn’t quite extend to the prying eyes of architecture critics: my requests to visit the open-plan social utopia have been politely declined. However, thanks to Facebook’s workplace culture of compulsive sharing, we can now live the Bay Area dream vicariously through its employees’ feeds on Instagram (which, coincidentally, Facebook acquired for $1bn in 2012). And boy, they’re excited to show off their new home. Let’s take a look at a day in the life of the new office.

The way to work

The entrance sequence, shown here emerging from the tunnel beneath the highway to the arrival at the big blue box, seems to have all the roadside glamour of pulling up at an out-of-town Ikea superstore.

Still, at least they’ve got space-age golf carts to shuttle you around the campus, complete with pointy white noses so you can pretend you’re on a Shinkansen bullet train as you trundle past the manicured verges.

Shimmering titanium! Yes, even when he’s designing you a discount warehouse, Gehry will find a way of sneaking in his trademark cladding material.

He’s up to his old tricks of facades-that-don’t-quite-fit again, recalling the games he played with some of the early houses in California, with overshooting structural frames – in the days before he got carried away with the computer modelling software.

It looks like the roof access ramp has been handled with all the subtlety and structural elegance you would expect from a Gehry building. No scrimping on the steelwork here.

Up on the roof

The pride and joy of the Facebookers (at least what they’ve been Instagramming the most) is the nine-acre rooftop park, complete with half-mile walking loop and 400 trees, pictured here in sunset filter mode.

It has a big lawn.

And a swinging cage where they put people who don’t share.

And lots of places to enjoy the view, like this platform that looks a bit like a decking sample at the garden centre.

There’s also a big pile of tree stumps, which seems to be an installation by tree stump artist Evan Shively. They seem to have become selfie stumps. Facebookers really enjoy jumping off them.

Note the expressions of compulsory fun. (Because they know where they’ll end up if they don’t share a selfie stump star jump.)

Skylights puncture the rooftop to bring much needed daylight down into the deep deep deep-plan office floor below.

There are also ramps. Lots of ramps. Ramps that don’t really seem to go anywhere.

And a rollerblade fun-park.

Stepping inside

Facebook’s Privacy Program Manager, Mark Pike, really likes to share. Here he’s shared the view of the main entrance on the way to his desk.

The lobby is decked out with a pick-n-mix selection of funky furniture and adorned with a big drippy mural by Maya Hayuk.

There’s a Facebook Wall! Geddit? Showing the first signs of dissent...

The office is big. Really big. Here’s a model so you can see the whole of Zuckworld all in one go.

And here’s the reality of what working inside a massive deep-plan shed feels like.

Fancy working with this hanging over you?

Industrial call-centre chic.

A breakout space nestles among the steelwork.

Oh and there’s art. Lots of art.

In an attempt to cheer things up a bit, 15 artists have been commissioned to dot the sprawling sheds with murals and installations, continuing a long-standing Facebook tradition (David Choe spray-painted Facebook’s original office walls in exchange for some company stock. Which turned out to be a wise move).

Here’s a bulging wall of frames by street artist Barry McGee.

And a mural by Chris Lux.

Radioactive Facebook juice seeps through the ceiling, as imagined by psychedelic muralist Jen Stark.

The Why room. Where Facebookers go to think big thoughts and ask big questions.

There’s also a place where everything is orange, where you can go when you’re sick of everything in social media being blue.

The staircase

Instagrammers have been giving this staircase a whole lot of love – perhaps because it’s the only part of the interior which seems to have been at all architecturally considered. Praise be, something’s been designed!

Gehry going back to his youth of rough-and-ready steel and untreated plywood.

Stairs can be social too.

The staff canteen is ominously named Full Circle. A riposte to Apple’s Infinite Loop? Or because what you don’t eat one day is served up the next?

And finally...

This is Mark Zuckerberg’s office on day one, after a hilarious office prank involving balls and giant fish. It’s obviously 430,000 square feet of non-stop banter. Oh the fun they must have.