Comcast, the CITC, and its place in Information Technology

In all the excitement surrounding Comcast's Innovation and Technology Center, it's easy to gloss over Comcast's original Center and regard it as old news. But the CITC's development, and what it means for Philadelphia, is more than just one tall tower that will outrank the likes of Atlanta and Los Angeles, it is also part of Comcast's sum total.

On its own, Comcast Center redefined Philadelphia's notion of Center City skyscrapers. With the exception of its northern neighbor, the Bell Atlantic or Verizon tower, Philadelphia's humble portfolio of true skyscrapers hug their sidewalks. On one block that could have easily housed Comcast's entire vertical campus, the cable giant decided to create a spectacle. Using a could-be footprint for another tower, Comcast opted for a grand plaza that breaks up the towering monotony of JFK Boulevard by creating a vantage point from which to admire Robert A. M. Stern's local masterpiece. 

In a lot of ways, the theory echoes Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan. As height restrictions led New York developers to step their skyscrapers back from the sidewalk in an effort to maximize every square foot, Mies van der Rohe decided to make a statement by "wasting" land on a plaza and designing a completely vertical skyscraper. 

Likewise, Comcast's plaza makes its Center both humbling and intimidating, and in providing both, likely achieved the company's goal. It's easy to wonder why the CITC isn't a bit taller. Why is the roof shorter than Comcast Center? Why does the spire face west, and not the campus's core? They may seem irrelevant questions, but no one spends $1B on a building without analyzing every last detail.

Were the CITC taller, if its spire faced Comcast's plaza, its presence might overpower Comcast's corporate headquarters. Despite its academic rank as Pennsylvania's tallest building, the CITC is still second to Comcast Center and its plaza. 

As the sum total stands, Comcast's vertical campus will be Philadelphia's best planned corporate park, at least in the West Market vicinity. With the exception of Independence Hall, the University of Pennsylvania's historic core, and a handful of other 18th and 19th Century projects, Comcast has set a new bar for future development. 

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However, what works aesthetically may not prove so practical, and it all hinges on Comcast's true plan for the CITC. As it is, Comcast is a telecom corporation, with only a very new and relatively small investment in information technology. IT companies throughout the Silicone Valley, the Cascade Valley, and the Dulles Corridor are comprised of sprawling campuses that look like high-tech universities. 

While many of these corporations decided to set up shop in the suburbs for financial reasons, the reasons they've stayed are logistic. It's not as though Apple, Microsoft, and Intel can't afford to build their own vertical campuses in San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland, it's that they don't want to. And for good reason. 

Apple's upcoming Concordia campus

Comcast, despite its apparent desire to delve into IT, is still every bit as corporate as JP Morgan. Although Big Software plays the corporate game on the same trading room floor, their philosophy, operations, and corporate demographics are at odds with Comcast's 52 year old model.

The free spirited software geeks tethered to their iPads and laptops aren't tethered to their cubicles. IT's endless string of meetings is less the end result of corporate bureaucracy, but a place for collaboration and productive innovation. The IT campus is very much a hive, not a hierarchy of elevator banks that reserve the uppermost floors for a select few. 

It will be interesting to see not only how Comcast fares in the unfamiliar world of information technology, but also how its vertical campus manages to support it. If it works, the CITC and Philadelphia will change the industry's game, proving that software and innovation can accommodate fixie saddled Millennials unwilling to commute or relocate to the Silicone Valley or King of Prussia. But Comcast's foray into innovation needs to be more than a building, a concept, and a vertical theory. First and foremost it needs to understand innovation, why software empires succeed, and why so many more come and go overnight. 

Information Technology is not an industry that survives on the status quo. It is the modern and global embodiment of the first 40 years of the automotive industry. It's a technological revolution that refuses to peak. Profitable Big Software doesn't succeed through mergers and acquisitions, those are simply the end results of successes and failures. Comcast can't buy its way into Information Technology, rather it needs to understand that companies like Apple and Google thrive by way of true innovation and a market that continues to crave the next best thing. 

2014's Best Proposal

Welcome to the New Year, and a new Philadelphia. 2014 gave us marriage equality and decriminalized marijuana. And while our skyline was forever altered prior to the Great Recession, the city is poised for another architectural renaissance that won't just change the way we look at Philadelphia, but how we interact with it.

Sure, Comcast is building the tallest American building outside New York and Chicago. But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and FMC are breaking convention by building tall north of Vine Street and west of the Schuylkill River. Whatever you think of Comcast Center, these other projects are true game changers. They will bridge gaps, extending what we think of Center City beyond its psychological barriers. 

But altering the way we see a city from the interstate is only part of what makes a city. Tall buildings can be purely aesthetic. Ask Los Angeles or Dallas. 

Philadelphia knows better.

Despite new heights being reached north, south, east, and west, the most influential project under development right now is taking place on Market East. NREA's East Market is clearing and rehabbing the Girard Trust Block for a massive mixed use complex bound by 11th and 12th. The project includes shopping, entertainment, restaurants, and a mid rise apartment tower, perhaps two.

In University City this might not seem so exciting. Hell, it wouldn't be unheard of in Conshohocken. But in Center City, developers tend to build up. East Market isn't necessarily tall, at least night in a city where we tend to look vertically. But Center City hasn't attempted a mixed use project on this scale since the Gallery at Market East. And unlike the Gallery, East Market isn't an attempt to offer urbanites suburban woes, it's offering city residents a slice of modern urbanism.

Its storefronts face the sidewalks, and it sacrifices land for even more pedestrianization by slicing the block in half. It's ambitious, but not blindly. It's finally giving Philadelphians what they want on Market East, what they've wanted for fifty years, and what it was a century ago: a shopping hub. 

It's called "Market Street" for a reason.

Sure, I may be gushingly deviating from truly Philadelphian pessimism, but it comes from a realistic place. East Market isn't another Gallery, it's the Gallery-done-right. The only reason it seems risky is because the Gallery is its only analogy. Architecturally, East Market is nothing special. Its modernity is carbon-copy, its tower looks like many built in the early 21st Century. The excitement of its renderings stems from plasma screens and flashy advertisements. But where East Market deviates from large projects past is its sustainability. 

It's engaging, it's smart, and it answers to what residents have been long asking for. It makes Market East feel less an island of poor urban planning and more like an integrated part of Philadelphia. Smart architecture doesn't just exist like Comcast Center or Centre Square, it engages the community and encourages future growth like Dilworth Park or the Piazza. It recognizes the fact that cities aren't just isolated buckets, but pieces of a larger whole. East Market isn't just good urbanism, it begs developers for more.

AOL and the Future of Comcast

Bradley Maule of Philly Skyline is back, now writing for Hidden City Philadelphia. With him come the memories of a Philadelphia circa 2005 when everyday we'd eagerly turn to his own website, Philly.com, Brownstoner, or Inga Saffron's Blogger page, anticipating the seemingly daily proposals for new skyline changing high rises.

Maule has ignited speculation that Comcast and Liberty Property Trust have revisited plans for 18th Street, possibly employing London's Foster + Partners, responsible for 30 Saint Mary's Axe and Hong Kong's HSBC Building, among many other modern marvels.

Liberty Property Trust owns both sites on 18th Street between JFK and Arch, formerly the proposed sites of the American Commerce Center and Comcast's annex mirroring Suburban Station. For now, this seems to amount to little more than speculation stemming from Liberty's ownership and Comcast's impressive cover letter.

While Comcast has seen record growth, particularly since it's acquisition of NBCUniversal two years ago, many are questioning the cable (now media) giant's viability in a variety of industries already experiencing massive technological shifts.

There's no doubt that Comcast has the money to employ Foster + Partners and the blind ambition to set a few more local construction records. But their corporate business model may be primed to go the way of AOL.

"What's that, Wes? You're crazy." said everyone.

Well, first of all, AOL is far from dead. It exists as a collection of media outlets that you likely don't realize you visit all the time. But as a visible force in the technological realm, it is no longer a unified entity to be reckoned with.

The company that once dominated internet technology was forced into decades of "right sizing" when the industry they owned - dial up and highly proprietary internet access - disappeared over night.

Once poised to introduce us to the future of the internet and media, AOL was experimenting with dozens of new technologies and integrated media only coming to fruition today.

Before companies like Google took the reigns by releasing new, experimental technology, even risking the release of hackneyed ideas like Google Glass, AOL played it safe, put AOLTV in the closet, and chose a speculative business model despite their proven technological merit, and continued to buy, buy, buy.

AOL grew to the point that shareholders usurped the roles of internet revolutionaries and the company that put the world online from a garage in suburban Honolulu became synonymous with Oldsmobile.

Now is it sounding more familiar?

Comcast is still largely rooted in cable and it's recent investments are in traditional media. Like AOL customers who began peeking outside their Buddy Lists and Chat Rooms to explore what the world wide web had to offer, Comcast customers are exploring a vast world of media outside the confines of their cable boxes.

While Comcast continues to push bundles, forcing customers to purchase networks peddling Babies Having Babies and HSN just to get NBC and Fox (and still pushing landline service as something marketable), younger consumers are opting out of traditional television for internet entertainment.

Comcast seems to think their customers won't find anything they like, and likely thinks it shouldn't matter. After all, it's hard to access the internet without Comcast, especially in Philadelphia, right?

Wrong.

Technology and access to interactive media seems to be changing too fast for the dinosaurs at 18th and JFK to grasp. In fact, it's changing too fast for many of us over thirty-five. Not only is a younger generation watching their television shows without a television, they're accessing the internet and all it offers without a computer. And that's where Comcast's reign begins to falter.

While many interact with media on smart phones and tablets, accessed through Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, the media their accessing is even less traditional, and often less corporatized.

Comcast seems to think its ace in the hole is in their acquisitions of mainstream media like NBCUniversal, while younger audiences are finding their entertainment on College Humor and Cracked.com and getting their news from BuzzFeed and privately run blogs.

You don't even need to be a Millennial to see the trend changing. A decade ago you likely wouldn't have met a person who didn't have several hundred channels cabled into their idiot box. Today you may only know a few.

Even if they are Comcast customers, much of people's viewing choices come from Netflix and Hulu where they can not only watch what they want when they want, but even watch original programming like Season 4 of Arrested Development and Orange Is The New Black which aren't even available on cable.

This rogue programming is often arguably better than standard programming because they're offered with less censorship, no network involvement, and are produced without the time constraints of the half hour sitcom or one hour drama.

Plus, and this is even more detrimental to the traditional cable programming business model, these programs are seemingly commercial-free because the advertising is imbedded in the application rather than interrupting the program. More and more people are willing to sit through a 30 second commercial to watch a three minute clip on YouTube, and advertisers are taking note.

If Comcast was smart, they would have bought Tumblr and Demand Media, not NBCUniversal.

It's hard to say if Comcast will ever choose to tap into this market. As Google begins to rollout Google Fiber, offering access 100 times faster than broadband, Comcast is saying we can't handle it and TimeWarner says we don't want it.

This may say little about the programming Comcast and TimeWarner offer, or the platform on which it's offered, but it says a lot about their corporate impression of the market place. 

These are the words of a monopoly. Of Walmart.

In fact, the cable industry has been lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to control how much of the internet their customers can access. Instead of joining the new media, cable providers are trying to block it. Like a cranky aunt with tight parental controls, Big Cable wants to restrict our viewing to serve their corporate interest.

Who knew allowing the sale of NBCUniversal to a company that controls which networks we access would have been a conflict of interest? Oh, just everyone.

But even if the cable industry succeeds in restricting Hulu and Netflix to serve themselves, market trends are dictated by the newest markets, markets these corporations don't seem to understand. These consumers already know where to find the content they want, and if they can't get it within a cable company's pre-packaged internet bundle, they'll find it on YouTube or download it from Russia.

And again, it doesn't matter because they're not watching television from a big screen TV in the living room, they're watching FunnyOrDie.com on the subway.

It's a new frontier.

These are consumers who got tired of Lady Gaga after a one year hiatus, despite her cult like following seemingly ages ago. To them, Google Fiber is Katy Perry and Comcast is Steely Dan. A laptop tethered to Comcast might as well be a big plastic Garfield phone.

If a technology company can't recognize that its market wants the newest and best, no matter how slightly newer or better, how will it ever be able to compete with the rogue, unpackaged entertainment within the Wild West of the internet, gaining more and more traction by the minute?

Barnes and Noble learned this from Amazon, and the retail industry learned this from everything from eBay to Overstock to CraigsList. Comcast, perhaps under the impression that access to the internet is somehow synonymous with the internet, ignored the memo.

As an amateur architectural buff with a vested interest in technology and our virtual environments, I only hope that Liberty Property Trust and Foster + Partners get to work on North 18th Street before Comcast's shareholders recognize exactly where they're headed.

Philly Earns Green Cred...Then Blows It

Philly got major props when Comcast completed the nation's tallest green building, Comcast Center. All that recognition will be marred once the city's gas guzzling Pennsylvania Convention Center expansion project is complete, designed by a quilt of architects including the Vitetta Group and Kelly/Maiello. Bringing the total footprint to a massive three blocks it appears to be competing for the national title of "Biggest Waste of Space" as the Pennsylvania Convention Center's reputation for its overpriced and notoriously lazy union staff deters many vendors from ever returning. As for it's friendliness towards Mother Earth, well with Mayor Nutter and the state's reputation as Official Bitch, I doubt we'll be seeing waterless urinals given the mafia - um, I mean, union - opposition to "less maintenance" when Comcast demanded them. Needless to say the prospect of a green roof is probably a concept the developers have never even heard of. We'll also receive an additional exhaust tunnel on 13th Street for idling busses chartered to take conventioneers as close as the Sheraton at 12th and Arch, and the Hampton Inn at 13th and Arch. Way to go Philly.