architecture

Art Gensler, the pioneering American architect who founded the world’s largest architectural firm and played a key role in the iconic look of Apple Stores, died Monday at the age of 85.

To try and distill Gensler’s career into “he helped create the Apple Store” is doing him a big disservice. His firm, founded in 1965, operates in 50 countries and produces an annual revenue of $1.5 billion. Nonetheless, for Apple fans, his work on Apple Stores is one of his many indelible contributions.

And he once got fired by Steve Jobs for it.

Home, the new Apple TV+ docuseries about unconventional structures designed by unorthodox architects, is — surprise, surprise — as much a mixed a bag as anything else on the streaming service.

The nine-episode series, available to watch Friday, provides a window into homes and the ethos, hardship and breakthroughs that lead to their creation. It would be an understatement to say that some episodes prove more interesting than others.

Apple’s redesigned Fifth Avenue Store reopens public tomorrow, bigger and better than ever. However, the landmark New York City store replaces a trademark Apple architectural design — the glass staircase — with a twist.

Breaking news: Steve Jobs was kind of a perfectionist when it came to design.

OK, so that’s not exactly the world’s best-kept secret. But a new story about the creation of Pixar’s headquarters highlights Jobs’ obsessive attention to detail. For anyone who remembers hearing about the creation of Apple Park, it will sound eerily familiar…

Apple’s newest store is more of a step back in time than the usual step into an all-glass box.

The tech giant proudly gave a sneak peek into its Washington D.C. outlet, a former Carnegie Library where Ive and Beaux-Arts styles blend for a refreshing feel to the Apple retail experience.

Of course, there’s a staircase.

Burton Rast had his first look at San Francisco 20 years ago and wondered aloud to a friend if it was possible to photograph one of the world’s most photographed cities in a new way.

With his iPhone 6s and some creative tweaking of the pictures in Adobe Lightroom Mobile, Rast has succeeded in producing a unique view of the city’s iconic architectural landmarks.

Steve Jobs was such a perfectionist that, for years, he didn’t fill his house with furniture simply because he couldn’t find items that measured up to his high standards.

Which is why it is oddly fitting that only now — approaching five years after the former Apple CEO’s death — is work finally set to begin on building Steve Jobs’ dream family house on land he bought way back in 1984.

With an innovative architectural style that brought elegant living to the masses, real estate developer Joseph Eichler left an indelible mark on California in the 1960s.

His beautifully simple blueprints also had an undeniable impact on Apple’s co-founders — although Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs took very different lessons from his work. Remarkably, Eichler’s design philosophy continues to shape Apple’s products, inside and out, to this day.

“I was very lucky to grow up in an Eichler,” Wozniak told Cult of Mac, referring to his family’s four-bedroom home in Sunnyvale, California. “It greatly influenced my liking of simplicity and open style. I like it whenever I see those attributes in any architecture.”

If you’ve ever walked into a flagship Apple Store unconvinced of the magic of Cupertino’s products, a wondrous curvy, glass staircase might have softened your psyche.

Apple’s retail outlets are almost as well known for award-winning architecture and eye-catching staircases as for the MacBooks, iPads and iPhones on sale. But Apple Stores aren’t the only places to make vertical trips seem like a magical journey.

Apple has won another architectural award for the innovative glass engineering used to create its impossibly perfect glass lantern store in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Apple Store at the Zorlu Center in Turkey took home the Supreme award for structural engineering excellence from this year’s Structural Awards, and was also honored for its excellence in structural design for a retail building.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine 

Architecture hasn’t really ever been considered too important in the brick and mortar-averse tech industry. It wasn’t all that long ago that digital utopians proclaimed physical geography dead altogether, with a vocal minority apparently pleased to leave the actual world behind them and embrace the cyberspace of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley have advanced almost inversely to the region’s architecture. In a brave new world of lush rolling hills and the always impressive San Francisco Bay, the most that the majority of companies have managed to come up with are drab industrial parks filled with two-story, cubicle-lined buildings.

Apple is still moving forward to build its $5 billion, 176-acre “spaceship” Campus 2 headquarters, expected to open in three years in Cupertino, California..

Critics have been attacking it since Apple CEO Steve Jobs first proposed it to the Cupertino City Council. And since that poignant moment, which was Jobs’s last public appearance, the campus project has evolved and changed. As I write this, the old HP buildings on the property are being demolished.

Here’s what we know about the spaceship campus so far, and also what the critics have been saying.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine 

Architecture hasn’t really ever been important in the brick and mortar-averse tech industry. It wasn’t all that long ago that digital utopians proclaimed physical geography dead altogether, with a vocal minority apparently pleased to leave the actual world behind them and embrace the cyberspace of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley have advanced almost inversely to the region’s architecture. In a brave new world of lush rolling hills and the always impressive San Francisco Bay, the most that the majority of companies have managed to come up with are drab industrial parks filled with two-story, cubicle-lined buildings.

There’s been a lot of hullyboo about skeuomorphism in the Mac and iOS community right now. Ever since the debut of iOS, Apple’s software has become increasingly ornamented with unnecessary textures and details that many people consider tacky, such as the fake Corinthian leather in Calendar or the green felt background in Game Center. This style of design is called skeuomorphism, and outed ex-Apple VP Scott Forstall was one of Cupertino’s main proponent for its wide spread use in iOS and OS X.

All signs point to Jonny Ive getting away with a lot of skeuomorphic details in iOS 7, adopting instead a more modern, ‘flat’ design.

The way people talk, though, it’s like skeuomorphism is a unique problem of the digital age. It’s not. In fact, the ancient Greeks had a problem with skeuomorphism too. So before you revile Scott Forstall for using it too much, keep in mind, it’s a design technique as old as civilization.

Apple submitted a new proposal, dubbed Submittal 6, for it’s super futuristic circular spaceship campus in Cupertino. The revision includes new details like bike and pedestrian paths, enhancements to street areas, and parking spaces for the huge project, which is behind schedule and $2 billion over budget. The current move-in estimate is in the summer of 2016, a date that continues to show up in the lastest revision.

Don’t you just love iCloud and how it seamlessly keeps all of your information synced up, making you feel all warm and light and free? Don’t you just want to marry it, or maybe live inside a nice fluffy iCloud synced world? Maybe not. But now you can, if you move to Melbourne, Australia and buy this gorgeous house that’s shaped like the iCloud logo.

Do you see it? How the structure makes an iCloud shadow there on the pool? Ok, we put that there to help you visiualize it, but seriously, this house looks almost exactly like the iCloud logo, and it’s just as crazy on the inside as the outside.

Apple has added another profile to its iPad in Business site. This one covers a company called Theatre Consultants Collaborative. Like all the iPad in Business videos and profiles, it illustrates the flexibility that the iPad offers and how it can be used as a professional tool across a wide range of industries.

It’s not set to open for another hour yet, but the curtain’s already been pulled back on Apple’s redesigned 5th Avenue store, which sees the iconic cube pared down from 90 panes of glass to just fifteen, and the architectural cruft needed to support them eliminated in favor of a new “seamless” design.

The end result is quite lovely, and makes the 5th Avenue location even more of a wonderful contradiction: how ironic that New York’s most photographed landmark is also its most invisible! More pictures below.

Apple is finally unveiling its seamless glass cube entrance to the Fifth Avenue store on Friday, according to MacRumors. Apple’s Fifth Avenue retail store is one of the most recognized Apple stores in the world and a main tourist attraction in New York City.

$6.6. million in renovations to the Fifth Avenue store will finally be revealed to the public on Friday, November 4th. Since June, there have been a series of temporary walls hiding the work that has now been done to the glass cube entrance of the store.

Apple’s never been afraid to borrow great ideas and make them their own. It should be no surprise, then, that Apple’s latest great idea — a giantspaceship-like HQ — was borrowed from someone else’s design. What may surprise you is the original design was made way back in the 1940s!