After a few years in rented quarters, RAND began to plan for its own building to house its staff, including about 250 researchers. John Williams, head of the Mathematics Division, surfaced the idea for creating a building that would increase the probability of chance personal meetings. Such meetings, he argued, would promote the interdisciplinary aspect of RAND -- the use of mixed teams of analysts in addressing a problem. Williams memo to RAND staff, "Comment on RAND Building Program," December 26, 1950, built the case for a system of closed courts or patios -- which led him to the theory of regular lattices, with average distances between points shown in a two-element matrix. The resulting set of patios, he felt, would ensure the maximum number of chance meetings and at the same time enhance, for the RAND staff, the qualities of privacy, quiet, natural light and air, and spaciousness.

During the dot-com boom, did any startups put this kind of thought into the architecture of the extravagant buildings they constructed with VC funding?

(RAND headquarters is just a few miles down the road from me ...)

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