From GCHQ to the Apple campus, huge disc-like buildings are popping up around the world. As artist Simon Denny warns, they betray a world with no corners in which to hide.





Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it,” Buckminster Fuller once said. Unfortunately, the public thought the same when the architect tried to flog them his circular houses. But if we’re not living in circles in the 21st-century, we’re increasingly finding ourselves working in them. The circle is emerging as a key modern form for office buildings and a way of organising people. Stepping out of them may no longer even be an option.

GCHQ in Cheltenham, AKA ‘the Doughnut’. Photo: Alamy

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, funky online retailer Zappos in Las Vegas, and Apple’s new campus. Each model has been tipped on its side, to accentuate the fact they are all circular.





This is more than just a coincidence. The models are by Simon Denny, a New Zealand artist who tackles the culture, impact and jargon of new technology. Previously, he’s made works that honour the tech maverick Kim Dotcom and mock the garish graphics of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) internal communications, as revealed by the Snowden leaks.





Denny is scrutinising how similar hacking culture is to “contemporary radical management practices”. Chief among them is “holacracy”, or rather, Holacracy® – a public idea that’s also a privately owned concept, which is about right for this strange new world.





For those not up on their radical management slang, Holacracy is a “complete system for self-organisation” that replaces traditional hierarchies with a supposedly more efficient system of autonomous teams of employees called “circles”. “More like a city and less like a top-down bureaucratic organisation,” is how Zappos chief Tony Hsieh put it earlier in 2015.





Zappos 1, 2015, by Simon Denny. Photo: MMB - Modellbau Milde Berlin/Galerie Buchholz





Zappos, owned by Amazon, is the biggest company so far to adopt Holacracy. It abolished all job titles and managers in late 2014, just as it moved into its new HQ, formerly Las Vegas City Hall. Zappos is the epitome of the trendy tech startup made good. Its motto is “deliver WOW through service”. It talks of its workforce in terms of “community” and “family”. And its circular campus is like a management diagram writ large.





Over at Apple, it’s a similar story. Their new campus, designed by Norman Foster and due to finish next year, is an elevated, four-storey, minimalist ring, utterly of a piece with Apple’s sleek products. Apple has not explicitly adopted Holacracy, but its innovation-seeking methodology has much in common with it. “The concept of the building is collaboration and fluidity,” an Apple exec told local planners. “We wanted this to be a walkable building – that’s why we eventually settled on a circle.”





Against all expectations, GCHQ is also flirting with Holacracy. It even won a business award last year for “creating the right environment for innovation and collaboration” (even if the creators themselves could not be identified). Former hackers as well as government suits roam the curved corridors of “the Doughnut”, as GCHQ’s base is known. This is not unusual, shows Denny. Big organisations are increasingly adopting the techniques of hackers, such as “hackathons”, where employees are encouraged to be playful, creative, even subversive. “Today, commercial organisations and hacking groups deploy a mixture of top-down and bottom-up techniques: a tension designed to enable directed, effective activity and also maintain the messiness necessary for the next thing to emerge,” he says.





Holacracy, 2015, by Simon Denny. Photo: Galerie Buchholz





Top-down and grassroots, private and public, secrecy and transparency, democratic freedom and Orwellian control – Denny’s work warns us that the boundaries are no longer visible.





All of this might sound eerily familiar to readers of Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle. The story takes place at a fictional boundary-pushing West Coast social media outfit – a walled garden of cutting-edge tech, employee benefits and great parties. But those high principles of “transparency” and “openness” start to get sinister, to the point where workers are endorsing Animal Farm-style slogans such as “privacy is theft” and “secrets are lies”. Eggers never really describes the architecture of The Circle, only hinting at “brushed steel and glass” and a vast, rambling campus where “the smallest detail had been carefully considered”.





The Circle (Dave Eggers novel - cover art)





Architecture has always reflected its creators’ power structures, though for most of western history it’s taken a more classical form. See Giuseppe Terragni’s rigorously ordered 1930s Casa Del Fascio, commissioned by Mussolini as the National Fascist Party headquarters – a perfect half-cube. Or Terry Farrell’s monolithic MI6 building in London (the one James Bond’s enemies seem to love blowing up). But Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was one of the first to apply this new circular logic – to the HQ of CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster. Rather than a skyscraper, he folded the building back in on itself to create a gigantic loop, in the name of operational efficiency.





That’s not to say that all circular buildings represent some emergent 21st-century order. It is interesting, though, that past precedents have usually been buildings designed for spectatorship: sports stadiums or, more resonantly, panopticon prisons, where inmates’ cells are arranged in a ring so they’re visible to guards in a central observation tower. Take away that tower and you have the Apple campus.





Source: The future is round: why modern architecture turned doughnut-shaped