How obsessive is Apple’s attention to detail? In their just opened 4th Street store in Berkley, California, everything is symmetrically aligned, from the squares on the sidewalk to the panes of glass to the stone floor tiles inside.
Go into the staff toilet and I’ll bet that even the toilet paper is hung just so that it could be unrolled and stretched in a straight line to align symmetrically with the sidewalk. Crazy… and totally awesome.
[via iFOApplestore]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
27 responses to “Every Single Line Means Something: Check Out The Berkley 4th Street Apple Store’s Crazy Supersymmetry!”
Berkeley.
Apple needs to design and build a store using the Golden Ratio next.
It’s always amazing how such tiny details get missed by other companies. Attention to detail is a huge boost. It’s like the battery meter at the bottom of Macbooks. You may not use it ever… But it’s there, and some day can save your a**, by letting you know how much battery you have for that flight. God (or devil) is in the details!
Ruben, AppleTVHacks.net
where the hell is “Berkley, California?”
You’re giving a BIT too much credit to Apple as revolutionary here.  The Parthenon in Rome was built this way, and this apple design is nearly a rip off of Mies van der Rohe buildings.  We’re talking the Seagrams building in New York, Federal Plaza in Chicago, Toronto-Dominion Centre and more.  Glass boxes with everything – absolutely everything – matched to the grid.  And many of Mies buildins are proportioned to the Golden Ratio.
actually the door height has exactly the golden ration with the overall height. Just look closely, the golden ratio is everywhere ;)
my dog is pissed u spelled his name wrong too. 3 E’s man 3 E’s!!!!!!
Apple store in a non-existent city :-)
Fact: The toilet paper in the rest rooms of that Apple Store, when pulled out the door and across the street, if a large enough roll of paper, would stretch in a perfectly straight line to 1 Infinite Way in Cupertino, CA, and line up with a roll of toilet paper in the executive board room restroom.
The Parthenon in Rome?!?!?!
Check your Berkeley spelling. I know. I was born there!
I think the Parthenon lies a bit East of Rome.
He probably meant to say Pantheon.
None of this is new or exciting or unsual. This is called architecture and aligning things is what we do… even in retail stores. An article on this is like having an article how amazingly complex a computer chip is… it is inherent to the product. Yes, Apple and their architects take the extra step to make sure everything is aligned but that is what you have to do when your designs are so minimalistic. If the glass joints didn’t align with the tile joints or the sidewalk panels, it would be immediately noticeable to the client and the customer. Look at any highend retail environment and you will find this. They do this because the have the money, time, and the building developer’s blessing because they drive retail traffic. Its basic retail architecture.
OMG all the comments on this blog align and the two columns are in a two-thirds/one-thirds ratio!! What does it all mean?! This article is double-rainbow.