For all the talk of “disruption” coming out of Silicon Valley, one thing that has tended to remain stubbornly stuck in the past is tech companies’ architecture. Many of today’s most innovative companies are housed in deadly dull, boxy and glassy suburban campuses: Google lives in the rehabbed buildings once occupied by Silicon Graphics, Facebook in a laboratory from the 1960s. Though the interiors might have advanced lighting systems, state-of-the-art fitness facilities and cafeterias serving farm-to-table fare, the exteriors — flat, unarticulated facades; ribbon windows; hard right angles — could come from any suburban office corridor anywhere in the country, and from any moment in the past half-century.

This is why the recently revealed plans for the new campuses of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., designed by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, and Apple, in Cupertino, from Sir Norman Foster, are so striking: They, like the companies they will house, point to the future — the future, that is, as it looked in the 1960s. Images of the projected Apple campus — a four-tiered ringlike structure nestled in a thickly wooded landscape — evoke the landing of an alien spaceship. The central structure in Ingels’s and Heatherwick’s design is canopied by a sinuous glass membrane, a protective bubble or amniotic sac, shielding an entire section of the campus — not just buildings but bike paths and desks — while letting the abundant Northern California light stream in. In aerial renderings it looks like larvae, incubating a new and possibly terrifying future.

Like the rest of Silicon Valley, however, this future is in fact rooted in the past. It comes, transfigured, from the wrecked dreams of communal living, of back-to-the-land utopias, of expanding plastic spheres and geodesic domes that populated the landscape of Northern California around the time (and around the same place) that the first semiconductors were being perfected. This is the world of what a recent exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has termed “Hippie Modernism.” Out of the ferment of the ’60s came a spectacular brew of experiments that softened the edge of the bureaucratic architecture of Modernism and explored new shapes and styles of building, new ideas about how to live and work. In the world of the counterculture, round and pliant was good; sharp and angular was bad. These concepts found their way into the cinema — into the soft plastic finishes of the circular, rotating space station in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where it was the antithesis of the sourceless, death-bringing black slab monolith, itself almost the clone of that icon of corporate Modernism, Mies van der ­Rohe’s Seagram Building. Now those same undulations have found their way back to us, in the form of impregnable corporate campuses for the future-plotting, world-dominating, “don’t be evil” tech industry.

It may sound unlikely, but there is in fact a strong connection between the utopian movements of the ’60s and the tech industry; it’s a topic that’s been well explored by academics, most notably in Stanford professor Fred Turner’s wonderful 2006 history “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” Turner’s book centers on the role played by Merry Prankster-turned-designer Stewart Brand, whose magazine The Whole Earth Catalog, started in 1968 and regularly published through 1972, advocated ’60s ideals of autonomy, do-it-yourself design and deep ecological thinking. The cover of the first issue was an image of the earth — another sphere — taken from space, exemplifying its spirit of holism. Brand advertised where you could get tools to build out the new society, among them, critically, new technology, from calculators to Moog synthesizers, which connected him, and the counterculture, to the burgeoning tech scene. Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired and one of the editors of The Whole Earth Catalog, thought that the magazine’s ethos of sharing products and communications, even its cobbled-together design, prefigured the blog. The young Steve Jobs, for one, was a huge fan. “On the back cover of their final issue,” Jobs told graduating Stanford students in a 2005 commencement speech, “was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’ ” Brand himself would later call Jobs one of the exemplary fusers of the counterculture and technology.

Brand was also an enthusiast for countercultural design ideas as a way to build a new society. In an issue from 1971, he called for the creation of an “Outlaw Area,” a territory removed from civilization, where human community could be reinvented. “Any design fantasy is just loose talk until it happens,” he wrote, suggesting that the Outlaw Area would transform our understanding of what human beings were capable of, “bending reality off into unimaginable directions with no restrictions save the harsh ones of nature.”

The designers who followed up on Brand’s injunctions over the next decade would create forms that startlingly presage the new office worlds being designed by Google and Apple. Above all, they would take to heart the idea of “bending reality,” with their embrace of soft, flexible, organic forms. Architects became attracted to furniture and buildings that resembled bubbles. As the design critic Alastair Gordon observed in his book “Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties,” not only did the trippy shimmer of the bubble delight the hippies, its transparency and unpredictable movement seemed at once stimulating and human. The visionary architect Buckminster Fuller’s famous concept of a “geodesic dome,” a giant all-purpose shelter, drew heavily on bubble imagery. Meanwhile, students at Antioch College in Ohio conceived of a “Nomadic/Pneumatic Campus,” an outdoor classroom sheltered by a 40-foot-high polyvinyl canopy. For a time the “offices” of The Whole Earth Catalog, in their temporary digs in California’s Saline Valley, were sheltered in just such a bubble. The fact that they were temporary was the key: Like the conversion of garages into tech offices, the bubble shelter was meant to be forgiving, improvisatory, for a nomadic and restless society seeking a new relationship with how to fuse life and work.

Not that these future society plans were limited entirely to the planet. In 1969, Princeton physics professor, Gerard O’Neill, and his students began to imagine how to create a space colony to house a million people. O’Neill’s vision comprised two concentric cylinders (round forms, again), spinning in opposite directions to generate gravity, and on which each person would be allotted five acres of land. The designer Don Norman did a rendering of the concept, and it bears a striking resemblance to the images of the new Google office: Filled with dazzling foliage, plentiful water and bucolic housing, it looks a lot like Marin County, placed under glass.

These images and experiments fueled the imagination of Silicon Valley, even as the young tech entrepreneurs began converting their ramshackle means to far different ends. It was, after all, an earth held in common that inspired the hippie Modernists to find new ways of designing and living. The new unearthly Silicon Valley campuses represent the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few. Neither the Google nor Apple campus is open to the public, nor are their designs replicable on the scale that the ’60s utopians imagined for their designs. Well after the orchards of Northern California were overwhelmed by glass boxes and suburban tracts, the tech companies find themselves looking longingly at an Edenic, prelapsarian moment, when it seemed that — to adapt a more recent slogan — another world was possible. But what was originally borne from improvisation and a desire to live simply is now borne from unimaginable mountains of cash. The new Apple office will cost an estimated $5 billion, making it possibly the most expensive office building in history. We are dealing with a bubble of a different kind.