The rivalry between the South Korean tech giants Samsung and LG isn’t just played out over sales of smartphones and curved television screens. Both companies are building new American headquarters, Samsung in north San Jose, Calif.; LG in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. And on this score, the contest isn’t close. Buildings are corporate symbols and advertisements, after all. Samsung comes across as a good citizen here; LG as a lousy neighbor.

Samsung’s 1.1-million-square-foot North American offices, designed by NBBJ and to be finished next year, include a boxy, sleek glass behemoth that vaguely harks back to office parks of the 1970s. It’s divided into three horizontal bands, like a layer cake, each with landscaped decks on top. The continuous bands can seem like a square riff on Norman Foster’s doughnut-shaped headquarters for Apple, both with big, curving atriums; here, the concept is based on traditional Korean courtyard architecture.

The building links to the city’s light-rail system and fits into San Jose’s street grid. It’s eco-friendly, with de rigueur green roof and green walls, and urban-minded, by Silicon Valley standards, with public gardens, plazas and a cafe near a parking garage that is partly camouflaged behind solar panels.

LG’s new $300 million, 490,000-square-foot headquarters would rise 143 feet high on a site next to the Palisades, which have been designated a National Natural Landmark. That’s several stories above the tree line. The site had been zoned to prohibit anything over 35 feet high, a provision that protects the view, but the company, a hefty local taxpayer, won a variance. LG points out that its project is on private land, a quarter-mile from the cliffs; that it earned approvals from Englewood Cliffs, Bergen County and the State of New Jersey; and that other taller buildings, off to the side, are visible from across the Hudson (as if that made any difference).