As Hawthorne noted, the building retains the trappings of a suburban office park. "Move beyond the high-end, high-tech aesthetics and landscaping, and you find a building that is pretty insular, even though it appears to be set on a busy street grid," Lamster wrote. "The idea: keep employees inside at all times, so they're never away from work. (Companies also like to point out that this kind of enforced proximity promotes collaboration and innovation.)"

Samsung is, in fact, famous for requiring that employees trying to innovate spend vast amounts of time with each other. In Korea, they even have a facility called the Value Innovation Program Center to which employees repair for months at a time to literally eat and sleep at work.

Design Observer's Alexandra Lange picked up on specific set of corporate cues. "Infinite loop. Check. Green walls. Check. Green roof. Check. Fitness feelies. Check," she wrote. "The renderings of this headquarters exhibits many of the de rigeur elements of new corporatism, focusing on glass and greenery and casually dressed people, making the workplace seem like more of a walk in the park, or a lifestyle, than an office."

She wondered whether the tension between the corporate subtext and casual facade could be resolved.

"The front, boxy building looks like a blandish 1970s office building newly retrofitted with a curving interior atrium," Lange said. "It should be rethought, as the message of its front facade doesn't match with the long, green-walled tail.

Founding editor-in-chief of Dwell Magazine and former New York magazine architecture critic Karrie Jacobs weighed in although she knew she was looking at Samsung's building. Generally, she had much the same reaction as those who did not know it was a tech company's new digs. "The idea is that everyone can see everyone and that this will somehow encourage human contact and collaboration. It's post-Panopticon," she said. "Not authoritarian but more about visual peer pressure, the built version of social media."

Where the others saw a general, bland corporate decisionmaking process at work, she had more explicit me-too reference points. "My first thought upon seeing the open core of the building was that Apple had reigned in its giant Foster donut," Jacobs said. She also compared the building to IBM's 1964 headquarters building in Armonk, NY. "Not for any good reason," she noted. "But the resemblance, real or imagined, was enough that I entertained the thought that maybe IBM was trying to reinvent itself yet again with a fabulous, greenish, state of the art Silicon Valley building."

Putting the responses together, I'm struck by the idea that this is an architecture of fitting in. When American companies look to foreign markets, they often talk about "localizing" their products for the "cultural preferences" of the target consumers. This building strikes me as what happens when a very smart company from a distant shore localizes ititself for Silicon Valley. It must have green space. It must have green walls. It must have "fitness feelies." And there is something for everyone, as BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh (and incoming editor of Gizmodo) observes. "They are also trying to project an appeal across class lines and lifestyles by depicting different types of render ghosts in the images: dudes in shorts, women in pant suits, a lady in a tennis visor, guys in Prada-like autumn wear sporting Ray-Bans in the sun."