(FORTUNE Magazine) – Deep within a Mountain View, Calif., technology park, somewhere inside the headquarters of Silicon Graphics Inc., I encounter a noisy cluster of software engineers drinking champagne. It's 3 P.M. on a Wednesday. "I guess we had a good quarter," says a sunburned man wearing a polo shirt the color of mint Crest.

The scene was typically Silicon Valley, with its work-is-play-is-work mentality. What wasn't typical was the building where the scene took place. This SGI fete didn't happen in an archetypal Silicon Valley nondescript prefab box. Nope. SGI's Amphitheater Technology Center is an architectural masterpiece--and not just by local standards. Designed by Studios Architecture and completed in 1997, the suite of four dazzling buildings, each with a colored rectangular tower, wraps around a grassy quadrangle, each structure as irregularly shaped as a jigsaw piece. The campus is a glass-and-steel interpretation of the 3-D special effects generated by SGI's workstations. The design, says one of Studios' principal architects, Erik Sueberkrop, "is supposed to express SGI's expertise in the marketplace."

As Silicon Valley comes of age, it is developing a genuine architectural style, a sweetened, more bubbly version of what the theory boys call deconstruction. And as Skidmore Owings & Merrill, creators of glass boxes like Lever House, was to New York City in the '50s and '60s, Studios Architecture is to the Valley in the late '90s.

Studios, a 14-year-old, 180-person firm based in San Francisco, initially began developing the Valley's new style through the design of office interiors. In 1986 the firm built a black-and-white tiled supercomputer room for Apple, an environment as snazzy as a restroom in an Ian Schrager hotel. More recently Studios filled Excite@Home's Redwood City warehouse with features like a snaking red slide and the firm's signature catwalks and exposed ducts.

But it's been only since the mid-'90s that Studios has been hired by Valley companies to design whole buildings that possess what Sueberkrop calls "positive exuberance." That's the feeling of another Studios project, 3Com's 1.3-million-square-foot campus in Santa Clara. 3Com's strategic planning manager, Peter Sandman, takes me for a ride in the company cab, an electric jitney with a yellow awning. "To the other side, please," he tells the driver.

On "the other side," the newest part of the campus, stands a truly beautiful example of corporate architecture, a cafeteria with a swooping, wing-shaped roof, partially supported by a tall steel V. Sandman refers to it as the "tuning fork"; Sueberkrop says it's the equivalent of a medieval Italian campanile. Inside is a futuristic version of a California drive-in.

Meanwhile, in Mountain View, another SGI campus is under construction. Studios has designed the latest buildings, which are glassy, rectilinear, and flexible enough to be leased out or sold, as economics dictates. These blocky structures are decidedly not interpretations of the 3-D fantasia inside SGI's computers. But they could reflect the firm's red-ink-laden 1998 balance sheet. As such they may be the clearest indication that maturity has hit the Valley.

--Karrie Jacobs

KARRIE JACOBS is editor-in-chief of the upcoming home-design magazine Dwell.