Sunday, April 27, 2025

The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley

Stanford built one of the first office parks in the country. Tech pioneers swooped in.

BY MARK DENT

In the town of Palo Alto, California, tucked away between El Camino Real and Junipero Serra Boulevard, you’ll find the most influential office park in the world.

Glassy buildings rise from manicured green lawns. Towering evergreen trees conceal asphalt parking lots. Somewhere, there’s a volleyball court.

Although the landscape resembles the same focus-grouped blandness you’d find at any of the thousands of office parks spanning America’s suburbs, the logos in front of the buildings stand out: Tesla, Google, HP, Rivian. Facebook was here in the early 2010s.

The personalities who’ve worked at this office park are just as prominent. A turtleneck-wearing man who invented the iPhone rented space in the 1980s after Apple ousted him. A turtleneck-wearing woman ran her miracle blood-testing company here before she was outed as a fraud.

Welcome to Stanford Research Park. Designed in the early 1950s as one of America’s first suburban office parks, the ~700-acre development is home to 150 companies.

But Stanford Research Park isn’t merely the setting for the cutting-edge tech companies and innovators that hold sway over America’s economy. By some measures, it catalyzed the entire scene.

If not for this suburban office park, Silicon Valley might not exist.

From apricots to microwave tubes

In the late 1940s, as students poured in after World War II, Stanford University faced a classic American dilemma: It owned a bevy of land but was going broke.

About 60 years earlier, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford had founded the university on his stock farm in Palo Alto, a sparsely populated town in a region where apricot and peach trees outnumbered houses. Roughly one-third of the world’s prune supply came from the orchards of Santa Clara County, which encompassed Palo Alto.

Santa Clara County orchards from the 1930s. (Postcard via Facebook/Bob Emerson)

When Stanford died in 1893, he bequeathed 8k acres of land to the school, under the condition that the property could never be sold.

The vacant land, which was largely unsuitable for agriculture, became an albatross over the next few decades. Stanford’s endowment sank in real dollars from $18m in 1910 to $13m in 1950.

“The university,” recalled Alf Brandin in a Stanford oral history interview, “had a lot of problems.”

A former Stanford football star who became the school’s business manager, Brandin was invited to a party celebrating the one-year anniversary of Varian Associates in 1949.

Brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, former Stanford students, had started the company in San Carlos, California, after developing klystron technology, a microwave tube that could be used for radar and televisions. At the party, Russell Varian told Brandin he wanted to move the company’s R&D division closer to associates at Stanford.

“I thought,” Brandin said, “‘They’re leasing [in San Carlos]. Why don’t we try to take the hint and do something with some of our land?’”

Varian Associates signed a lease to build a $1m company headquarters on 9.5 acres of land to the southeast of campus in October 1951 and moved in two years later. Eastman Kodak signed a lease in 1952 to build a photo processing plant.

Spurred on by Varian Associates, Brandin started discussing an “industrial park” development totaling 138 acres. When he toured suburban Denver with a Stanford alum, he was struck by how a subdivision’s lack of fences accentuated rolling hills, lawns, and trees.

To him, it felt like a park, and he thought they should do the same with the budding industrial development at Stanford.

The Hustle

The idea for a suburban office park was novel at the time.

• Bell Labs had opened a sprawling suburban campus in 1942, where scientists would invent the transistor, but that was a corporate headquarters rather than a site for multiple companies.
• A suburban office park in Mountain Brook, Alabama, is often cited as the first in the US. But it was approved in 1955, after Varian Associates had moved onto Stanford land.

The demand for these developments was apparent. America’s relentless march to the suburbs had begun, and corporations found downtowns crowded and grimy.

They wanted to separate management from their union laborers and to ply white collar workers with ample parking, verdant landscaping, and country club amenities, like tennis courts and walking trails — the modern predecessors of the ping-pong table.

These companies believed in a “purported magic of gazing at greenness,” wrote University of California, Berkeley landscape architecture professor Louise Mozingo in “Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation. This magic was “credited with generating productivity, competitiveness, and public approbation.”

The question for Stanford was what type of companies the park should attract.

Steering tech companies to the park

Brandin signed a variety of firms to leases after Varian Associates and Eastman Kodak. Soon, however, Frederick Terman pitched Brandin on the importance of tech companies, which were expanding because of plentiful government funding.

Terman was a Stanford engineering professor who became dean of Stanford’s engineering school in 1944. He’d taught the Varians, as well as students Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

Rather than take jobs at existing technology companies when they graduated — many of which were located on the East Coast — he encouraged them and other graduates to start their own businesses. He even provided Hewlett and Packard with $500 of seed money.

Frederick Terman. (Wikimedia Commons)

As Varian Associates and Hewlett-Packard prospered, Terman recognized that the university and the tech firms could benefit from proximity, building off each other’s ideas and sharing resources and funding.

The center of the relationship could be the industrial park, which the school would eventually name Stanford Research Park.

“Alf Brandin saw the point very quickly and very soon thereafter, if you weren’t a high-technology company, you had a hell of a time coaxing him to give you a lease,” Terman said in a Stanford oral history interview.

Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric moved into Stanford Research Park. Terman also convinced Bell Labs’ William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, to move to the Park (after his company was originally headquartered in Mountain View).

Many of these early companies signed 99-year prepaid leases that benefitted them and Stanford:

• Stanford received an infusion of cash, getting as close as it legally could to selling the property, and reaped the benefits from land improvements made by the companies.
• Companies like Varian Associates, which paid $41k upfront for a 99-year lease of 10 acres ($516k today), were grandfathered into below market-rate deals as the office park grew, often paying a fraction of what newer lessees paid.

Terman also started an Honors Cooperative Program, granting enrollment to employees at the Research Park, so long as their companies fronted 2x the listed tuition price.

The program led to cross-pollination between the university, the companies, and their workers, who shared knowledge with their employers or started new companies in the region. Shockley alone was credited with helping spawn 50 semiconductor firms.

By 1970, people began calling the area Silicon Valley, a name popularized by journalist and engineer Don Hoefler. And by 1980, the population of Santa Clara County had swelled to ~1.3m, up from ~290k in 1950.

The Hustle

Stanford Research Park was at the center of the growth. Out of the 192k tech workers in Silicon Valley in the early ‘80s, roughly one of every eight worked at the park, from college graduates just starting out to luminaries like Steve Jobs.

“Why is Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley?” the Associated Press wrote in 1984. “Because, to a remarkable degree, of one man, Dr. Frederick Terman, and one university, Stanford.”

The lasting influence of Stanford Research Park

Around the country, as companies have returned to cities or promoted hybrid work schedules, many suburban office parks have gone the way of the drive-in movie theater and the mall.

• Post-pandemic, vacancy rates at suburban office spaces ticked up from ~13%-17%, and many office parks in areas like the New Jersey suburbs are being transitioned into retail and housing.
• In 2023, Bell Labs announced it was leaving its historic corporate office park for a new campus in an urban setting, symbolizing the uncertain future of suburban office parks.

Stanford Research Park, however, has defied the doomsday trends. Its 140 buildings are home to some 29k employees, and it inspired research parks developed by Arizona State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rice University, and many others.

These parks have been credited with fostering so-called “strong ties” that lead to people and firms working together.

Stanford Research Park, seen from above. (Jun Seita via Flickr)

If anything its influence has perhaps been too significant.

Like many suburban office parks, Stanford Research Park hewed to a setting that emphasized exclusion, parking, and low-density buildings. It helped set the pattern for housing and office developments that followed.

Today, Palo Alto’s ratio of jobs to housing, a benchmark for measuring a healthy supply of homes, is more than 3x the US average and far higher than other cities in the area.

“The reason Palo Alto has the worst jobs-housing imbalance of any community around here is largely because of the Stanford Research Park,” former Mountain View mayor Lenny Siegel told the news site Reveal.

Regardless, its status as a pioneering suburban office park — for better and worse — is clear.

As Varian Associates explained in a company history, Stanford Research Park was “the most successful complex of its kind in the world.”

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