Silicon Valley startups might be in the business of remaking the world, but you’d never guess it from their architecture, which tends toward the serviceable and uninspired. Even the few tech companies that have hired big names to design their headquarters—think Frank Gehry for Facebook or Norman Foster for Apple—have wound up with buildings that are relatively low-slung, studiously informal, or tucked away from public view.
The great exception is a jaw-dropping structure at Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View that, nearly a century after it was built, still manages to suggest a historic design breakthrough and throw off a futuristic gleam. Known as Hangar One, it was constructed between 1931 and 1933 with help from a pair of naval engineers, Rear Admiral A.L. Parsons and Lieutenant Commander E.L. Marshall, principally to hold the dirigible the USS Macon, then one of the two largest helium airships in the world. Imagine a warehouse combined with the sublime scale of a cathedral, or a redwood grove, and you’ll begin to have a sense of its memorably hybrid character. At the time of its construction, it had the longest span of any building in the world, producing an interior “so vast,” according to the Society of Architectural Historians, “that fog occasionally formed near the ceiling.” This was a garage, yes, but a Brobdingnagian one, nearly 200 feet tall at its highest point, with 300,000 square feet of column-free space and giant clamshell (or “orange peel”) doors, each weighing 500 tons, at either end. All in service of a single airship, albeit one that essentially operated as an aircraft carrier in the sky, with room for as many as five military planes in its belly.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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From its first days, however, this early product of the military-aerospace alliance that helped birth Silicon Valley (while also producing huge Southern California hangars in Tustin and Playa Vista) has been shadowed by disaster and uncertainty. In February 1935, the Macon crashed into the water off Big Sur while carrying four Sparrowhawk F9C-2 biplanes and 83 men and sank to the bottom of Monterey Bay, killing two of the troops. (The news was big enough to warrant a banner headline atop the front page of the Los Angeles Times: “Macon Plunges in Sea; All but Two Saved.”) Despite the loss of its anchor tenant, though, Hangar One remained in use, sheltering U.S. Army and Navy aircraft of various sizes, until 1991, when Congress voted to decommission Moffett Field. Three years later, the hangar and more than 1,000 acres of surrounding land were transferred to NASA and integrated into its adjacent Ames Research Center.
A different kind of setback came after NASA, in 1997, detected polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in the Ames storm drains; further testing confirmed that Hangar One’s siding and exterior paint were the sources of the toxins, leading the structure to be closed in 2003. After exploring a range of options, including demolition—and hearing from preservationists who saw in the hangar’s architectural details important references to the streamline moderne style—NASA decided to save the building. An agreement called for the navy to strip off and carefully dispose of the contaminated exterior panels and for NASA, eventually, to reclad the hangar.
As it turned out, there was an interval of several years between the stripping and the recladding, during which time NASA tried to figure out how to use the vast space while leaving the steel structure exposed to the elements. As I learned when I visited it in this state roughly a decade ago, this had the effect of making the hangar even more dramatic—sublime, even—than before. The interior rooms that had once stood beneath the cavernous ceiling had, along with the cladding itself, been cleared away as part of the construction work, leaving no barrier between a visitor like me, made to feel small and insignificant, and the sweeping lattice of steel (and the visible sky) overhead. It was one of the first times I truly understood what the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier had meant when, in his 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture, he singled out feats of early-modern engineering, like bridges and grain silos, as possessing a kind of life force altogether lacking in the fussy, revivalist architecture of the period. “The Engineer,” he wrote, “puts us in accord with universal law.”
I don’t know if I felt in accord with universal law, exactly, but I will say that my visit landed Hangar One on a very short list of design destinations that strike me as both stunningly scaled and specifically American in character, which is to say emblematic of a particular blend of U.S. know-how and hubris, or maybe pragmatism and virtuosity. The list also includes Eero Saarinen’s 1965 Gateway Arch in St. Louis (which I expected to be a one-note postcard icon but which instead wowed me with its shining, leaping, sinewy power) and the Astrodome in Houston, which also opened in 1965 as the world’s first domed stadium. Hangar One is a precursor, a West Coast antecedent, to those better-known landmarks.
In 2013, NASA and the federal government’s General Services Administration issued a call for proposals to restore Hangar One to its original design, ultimately selecting a Google subsidiary called Planetary Ventures to carry out the job. The work is expected to be completed in 2025. According to numerous news reports, in exchange for dedicating more than $200 million to rehabilitate the hangar, as well as paying rent, Planetary Ventures was granted permission to use its interior. Included in the deal was space for Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and former CEO and executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to park their private jets.
But Brin, at least, had bigger goals in mind when he helped save Moffett Field. He has been using one of the three hangars there to hold (and hide away from prying eyes) Pathfinder 1, the prototype for a new generation of electric airships developed by a startup he founded in 2015, LTA (for Lighter Than Air) Research. Made of carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer tubes and welded-titanium hubs, Pathfinder 1 received a one-year clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration last fall for low-altitude flights on and around the airfield. At roughly 400 feet long, it is still more than 350 feet shorter than the USS Macon.•
Correction: The print version of this article incorrectly stated that Pathfinder 1 was stored in Hangar One. The airship is held in a different structure at Moffett Field.
Christopher Hawthorne is a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a former longtime architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2018 to 2022, he served as chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, where he helped organize the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group and edited its 2021 report and recommendations, Past Due.
