Apple store manhattan architect12/31/2023 ![]() But that place is a tiny cottage compared to the proposed new headquarters. I still feel that way their pristine glass box on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is the best Apple store yet. When Apple started opening retail stores, most of which have been designed by the firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, I thought they’d gotten it exactly right, and figured out how to translate the aesthetic brilliance of the company’s products into architecture. I suppose Apple has solved enough problems over the years that it may not be entirely fair to expect it to conquer suburban sprawl, too, but you would hope that a forward-thinking company would at least try not to compound the problem. He pointed out that, however elegant the headquarters might turn out to be, it will still be a huge suburban office complex, reinforcing car culture at a time when that seems increasingly less tenable. Flexibility is a hallmark of the iPad, and it counts in architecture, too, but how much flexibility is there in a vast office governed entirely by geometry? For all of Foster’s sleekness, this Apple building seems more like a twenty-first-century version of the Pentagon.Ĭhristopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, was one of the first to write about the new Apple building. With this building, there seems to be very little sense of any connection to human size. In architecture, scale-the size of various parts of a building in proportion to one another and to the size of human beings-counts for a lot. (Last year, I wrote about the design for the new Apple store on the Upper West Side.) A building is also a tool, but of a very different sort. So why is Foster’s design troubling, maybe even a bit scary? The genius of the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, and other Apple products is that they are tools that function well and happen to be breathtakingly beautiful. But buildings aren’t spaceships, any more than they are iPhones. Like everything Foster does, it will be sleek and impeccably detailed, but who wants to work in a gigantic donut? Steve Jobs, speaking to the Cupertino City Council, likened the building to a spaceship. The building, which will house upwards of twelve thousand employees, will have a circumference of a mile, and will be so huge that you won’t really be able to perceive its shape, except from the air. The finesse of Foster’s modernism would seem a natural fit with Apple, which produces the best-designed consumer products of our time, and which has done more than any other company to inject sophisticated modern design into the mass market.įoster has proposed a gargantuan glass-and-metal ring, four stories high, with a hole in the middle a third of a mile wide. Foster may be the best large architectural practice around today, a firm that has done remarkably well at maintaining quality even as it produces more enormous corporate, institutional, and civic buildings all over the world. ![]() ![]() ![]() But images of Apple’s future home, to be built on a campus that it has taken over from Hewlett-Packard, are all over the place, because plans must be presented to the local authorities in Cupertino, who understandably are falling all over themselves with delight. With Apple’s characteristic secrecy, the company hasn’t officially released the design, or announced that the architect is Foster + Partners, the London-based firm known for its super-sleek, elegant, exquisitely detailed buildings. I don’t usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren’t yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn’t look great as a model? Still, it’s hard not to comment on the new headquarters that Apple plans to build in Cupertino, California. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |