"Despite
being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its
isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s
a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email
and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings,
from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing. You say
‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
So he had the Pixar building
designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building
doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked
by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out
of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not
otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the
atrium, the café and the mailboxes were there, the conference rooms had windows
that looked out onto it, and the six-hundred-seat theater and two smaller
screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,”
Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve
never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as
this one.”"-Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
