IN SILICON VALLEY the coolest home for a technology start-up is neither a glittering glass tower nor an eco-friendly campus, but a humble garage. It all started in 1938, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard chose a detached garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto to house their fledgling electronics business. The restored structure is now considered to be the official birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs followed suit in the 1970s, building the first Apple computer in his parents’ Los Altos garage, a dozen miles away. As software followed hardware, Adobe and Google reinforced the garage myth: that young companies long on talent and short on money could change the world while surrounded by car parts and oil cans.

Recently, however, Silicon Valley’s garages have started to look a little old-fashioned. New arrivals like Willow Garage, a promising robotics start-up, might pay lip service to garage culture, but in reality they do their innovating in glassy office parks.

Now a local group plans to reinvent the Silicon Valley garage for the 21st century. The ZERO1 Garage, 10,000 square-feet of it, is opening in downtown San Jose this autumn. It will bring together sharp new artists and technologists to create ideas and companies concerned with sustainability, the environment, internet policy, gaming and open data.

“Artists are by far the most radical experimenters in society,” says Joel Slayton, executive director of ZERO1. “And yet they are not deeply engaged in technology innovation in the business sense. We want to insert artists into the very earliest stages of venture business.”

Quite what artists have to do with garages is unclear, but Google has already signed up with ZERO1 to work with an artist on topics as diverse as intellectual property, privacy and security, and Adobe is coming too. The firm hopes that three more tech companies will invest in what it describes as “part think-tank, part incubator, part exhibition space”. Hewlett and Packard, eat your hearts out.