Menlo Park Renaissance (Part 3)

Parts of Silicon Valley are extremely beautiful. My favorite is Woodside. However, other parts of Silicon Valley are plain vanilla. San Jose, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Carlos, and Redwood City – these towns have no style and not much to offer in terms of aesthetics. Silicon Valley has never really paid attention to style or aesthetics. The culture here emphasizes understated. It is an asset, this emphasis on substance over showing off. However, style and aesthetics – a moral commitment to beauty – are not synonymous with showing off.

Thus, our third positioning point is to build here the culture and style capital of Silicon Valley.

That Silicon Valley has come to respect taste, style, and design isreflected in Apple’s extraordinary success. When asked what Bill Gates envies in Steve Jobs, the former replied, “Steve’s taste.”

The time has therefore come for Silicon Valley to wake up and pay attention to cultivating taste. In architecture. In fashion. In art. In music. In life.

The vision for Menlo Park needs to encompass a well-thought-through architectural oversight policy such that what gets built here from this point on is worth building.

Equally important is the user experience. Boutiques need to carry merchandise worth carrying. We want eclectic designers who align with our understated culture; we want art galleries that bring to the community interesting visual experiences; and we want a performing arts scene and nightlife that turns this place from a sleepy, suburban “dead zone” to one where young people want to spend not just their working hours, but also their play time.

Concepts like Yoshi’s Jazz Club (Oakland and San Francisco), Pena Pacha Mama (San Francisco), and 606 Club (London) need to be explored and transplanted. Designers like Sarah Pacini, whose understated elegance has always appealed to my not-so-easy-to-tap-into wallet, need to be incubated and brought to market. A modern-day Gertrude Stein needs to bring to light the modern-day Picassos, Matisses, and Hemingways.

Yes, we’re in search of that creative cauldron akin to Paris in the 1920s or Florence under the Medicis.

You think this is an unreasonable quest? Well, all progress depends on the unreasonable man, remember?

This segment is part 3 in the series : Menlo Park Renaissance
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