Cafes, the new garages?

Jackson West writes about the growing importance of cafes in the Bay Area as workspaces:

Forget Palo Alto garages-- San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your
startup off the ground. Internet cafes are emerging as an important place to get work done, hold meetings and network. Since writers, designers, developers and anyone else who can work from their laptop are going to show up, you can even recruit talent, publicize your project and even demo your product for potential users and investors.

I think this won't come as news to many, but the notion that cafes can legitimately be thought of as business places (and not just to sell coffee, but to conduct a wide variety of businesses) has a lovely early modern quality about it.

At the same time, it reinforces a point that many smart writers about the relationship between the Internet and physical places have made: Web access (and especially wireless access) doesn't make place irrelevant, it just changes the criteria people use for deciding which places they're going to work in. In an interview we conducted a couple months ago, MIT professor William Mitchell explained how unwiring Internet access and other facilities was changing both the ways users think about workspace, and the opportunities architects have to design interesting spaces:

In architecture, in making the layout of a building, adjacency is a scarce resource. You can never satisfy all of the adjacency requirements that exist. Everybody would like to be next to the coffee machine and simultaneously next to the best view and simultaneously next to the people they work with. That's impossible.

When you introduce wireless connectivity, though, you eliminate a bunch of requirements for adjacency. You no longer have to be adjacent to a network jack in order to have connectivity, or adjacent to paper files in order to do your work. You can take them, sit down anywhere, and work.

What happens then is that adjacency demands that had previously been latent and unsatisfiable have now become satisfiable, so they take over, and reclustering begins to emerge.... If there's been a kind of latent demand for clustering, socializing, serendipity, getting together, all of that kind of stuff, if you loosen up the old adjacency constraints people are going to satisfy those demands. If people are working in loud environments and they'd really like to be working in the garden or in the sunshine or something, then that's what's going to happen.

This is something that will only become more pronounced as time goes on:

I think we are seeing a very clear movement towards much more flexible and nomadic occupation of space -- of architectural space, of urban space.... [Furthermore,] as digital technology becomes really good -- becomes really small, really reliable, really capable, and really ubiquitous -- it can disappear... [I]t becomes less and less necessary to build architectural environments around specialized technical requirements. If you've got better control systems you can have operable windows and natural light. Do you remember old-fashioned computer labs that used to be darkened spaces because the screens were so dim? Well, you don't need that anymore because screens are bright -- they just work better. Similarly, it used to be that classrooms were darkened because the audiovisual equipment meant you had to darken the space. Well, now we can put natural light into classrooms because, again, the display technology is powerful enough.

The interesting paradox is the more high-tech a space really is, the less high-tech it looks. And you can go back to very basic human things like light and air and view with operable windows and sociability. So you start to go back to being able to build the architecture around the human beings rather than the technical systems. And it's the opposite of what everybody thinks, what most people think, and it's a tremendously exciting thing for architects.

Likewise, the shift from garages to cafes reflects not a sense that you can completely do away with offices or meeting-spaces, but a shift in preference away from spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions.

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