I’d love to help you find property in New Hampshire, it’s awesome here. When you say “good indoor spaces for work and hangouts”, for how many people, and can you be more specific about your desires for the space?
(Caveat: I’m mostly just replying to ‘how many people do you need to fit?’ here and discussing size, rather than trying to list everything we might want from indoor spaces. Also, my whole comment is simplifying things a lot, because a full answer would be too in-the-weeds. I err on the side of being way, way too concrete and hypothesis-privileging in order to paint an easy-to-visualize picture and keep my reply short. And Blake hasn’t reviewed this comment, so he might disagree with my claims/framing.)
Short answer: Proto-campuses with total sqft below 5000 are very likely too small; and all else being equal, I’d tend to consider 6000+ sqft ‘OK/workable’, 12,000+ sqft ‘quite good’, and 20,000+ sqft ‘great’.
Longer answer: We can divide indoor spaces into ‘space to work in’ and ‘space to live in’, and we can divide MIRI into ‘~18 researchers’ and ‘~10 non-researchers’. (Some buildings might be a mix of living spaces and working spaces, at least initially.) On that division, there are two very-important ‘indoor space’ things we want from a (proto-)campus, and two pretty-valuable indoor space things we want (ignoring all the small details like water pressure, lighting, sound isolation...).
Very important (#1) - There’s enough working space for the ~18 researchers already.
Our Berkeley office was ~10,600 sqft (plus ~1400 sqft CFAR used, and ~2000 sqft for LW and community events), which was a good amount of work space for us. (Somewhat more than we needed at the time, leaving room for staff growth.)
A proto-campus with (e.g.) 5000 sqft would be a tight squeeze no matter how that space is allocated between rooms/buildings, and I’d be surprised if anything less than 5000 sqft were big enough.
(Caveat: what matters is the actual useable space. We’ve found properties that were listed as <5000 sqft but were more promising than that number alone may make it seem, because there were garages or other nearby buildings that could be turned into work space.)
Very important (#2) - We can build or purchase as much working and living space as we’re likely to want, and have it be finished within 3 years (or better, 1 year; or better still, we have enough space at the outset).
I’m confident at least some MIRI staff won’t live on the campus, even if we have plenty of room. But I’m unsure exactly how many current or future staff will live on the campus, and how many spouses, friends, colleagues, community members, etc. will live or work there. If we moved into a big proto-campus we were excited by, I wouldn’t be shocked if as few as 10 or as many as 50 people lived on the campus a couple years later.
I think this would ideally look like a bunch of houses that feel roomy and don’t force people to live with more people than they want. (Less Bay Area ‘cram people into every spare closet’, more ‘you and a friend can split a house if you want to’.)
(Hence my note in the OP that we probably want at least 20 acres, and ideally 50+ acres; and that we need to be able to build or otherwise expand.)
Pretty valuable (#3) - There’s enough living space for at least a few staff, a 0-5 minute walk from working space.
Whereas #2 notes that we want to eventually have lots of living and work space, #3 notes it would be very nice if we initially have at least some living space. If there’s enough square footage at the outset that (e.g.) five staff can live there, in addition to the work space, then that’s a big plus.
Pretty valuable (#4) - There’s already enough working space for the ~10 non-researchers too.
This is another very big advantage, but not totally indispensable.
Thinking out loud: Maybe the ideal would be to start with something like ~20,000 sqft of work+community space spread across 1-3 buildings, plus 10-20 medium-sized houses for people to live in, with plenty of capacity to add more work and living spaces as desired? (I haven’t been very involved in MIRI’s location-choosing process, so this is way-overly-concrete speculation on my part.)
The best places we’ve seen so far have had more like 1-8 buildings, totaling 7000-25,000 sqft. Most 20+ acre properties we’ve seen have exactly one building on them, often a 5k+ sqft house.
I’d love to help you find property in New Hampshire, it’s awesome here. When you say “good indoor spaces for work and hangouts”, for how many people, and can you be more specific about your desires for the space?
(Caveat: I’m mostly just replying to ‘how many people do you need to fit?’ here and discussing size, rather than trying to list everything we might want from indoor spaces. Also, my whole comment is simplifying things a lot, because a full answer would be too in-the-weeds. I err on the side of being way, way too concrete and hypothesis-privileging in order to paint an easy-to-visualize picture and keep my reply short. And Blake hasn’t reviewed this comment, so he might disagree with my claims/framing.)
Short answer: Proto-campuses with total sqft below 5000 are very likely too small; and all else being equal, I’d tend to consider 6000+ sqft ‘OK/workable’, 12,000+ sqft ‘quite good’, and 20,000+ sqft ‘great’.
Longer answer: We can divide indoor spaces into ‘space to work in’ and ‘space to live in’, and we can divide MIRI into ‘~18 researchers’ and ‘~10 non-researchers’. (Some buildings might be a mix of living spaces and working spaces, at least initially.) On that division, there are two very-important ‘indoor space’ things we want from a (proto-)campus, and two pretty-valuable indoor space things we want (ignoring all the small details like water pressure, lighting, sound isolation...).
Very important (#1) - There’s enough working space for the ~18 researchers already.
Our Berkeley office was ~10,600 sqft (plus ~1400 sqft CFAR used, and ~2000 sqft for LW and community events), which was a good amount of work space for us. (Somewhat more than we needed at the time, leaving room for staff growth.)
A proto-campus with (e.g.) 5000 sqft would be a tight squeeze no matter how that space is allocated between rooms/buildings, and I’d be surprised if anything less than 5000 sqft were big enough.
(Caveat: what matters is the actual useable space. We’ve found properties that were listed as <5000 sqft but were more promising than that number alone may make it seem, because there were garages or other nearby buildings that could be turned into work space.)
Very important (#2) - We can build or purchase as much working and living space as we’re likely to want, and have it be finished within 3 years (or better, 1 year; or better still, we have enough space at the outset).
I’m confident at least some MIRI staff won’t live on the campus, even if we have plenty of room. But I’m unsure exactly how many current or future staff will live on the campus, and how many spouses, friends, colleagues, community members, etc. will live or work there. If we moved into a big proto-campus we were excited by, I wouldn’t be shocked if as few as 10 or as many as 50 people lived on the campus a couple years later.
I think this would ideally look like a bunch of houses that feel roomy and don’t force people to live with more people than they want. (Less Bay Area ‘cram people into every spare closet’, more ‘you and a friend can split a house if you want to’.)
(Hence my note in the OP that we probably want at least 20 acres, and ideally 50+ acres; and that we need to be able to build or otherwise expand.)
Pretty valuable (#3) - There’s enough living space for at least a few staff, a 0-5 minute walk from working space.
Whereas #2 notes that we want to eventually have lots of living and work space, #3 notes it would be very nice if we initially have at least some living space. If there’s enough square footage at the outset that (e.g.) five staff can live there, in addition to the work space, then that’s a big plus.
Pretty valuable (#4) - There’s already enough working space for the ~10 non-researchers too.
This is another very big advantage, but not totally indispensable.
Thinking out loud: Maybe the ideal would be to start with something like ~20,000 sqft of work+community space spread across 1-3 buildings, plus 10-20 medium-sized houses for people to live in, with plenty of capacity to add more work and living spaces as desired? (I haven’t been very involved in MIRI’s location-choosing process, so this is way-overly-concrete speculation on my part.)
The best places we’ve seen so far have had more like 1-8 buildings, totaling 7000-25,000 sqft. Most 20+ acre properties we’ve seen have exactly one building on them, often a 5k+ sqft house.