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 campus Cupertino “spaceship” Campus 2 headquarters, expected to open in three years.
Critics have been attacking it since 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 and, 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.
The property will be capable of holding 14,200 employees. Some 12,000 of those will be in the circular mothership building, and the rest in 600,000 square feet of office, research and development buildings along one of the adjacent streets. Due to ballooning costs, the extraneous buildings have been delayed for phase 2 of the project, to come later. So the initial project will include only the giant bagel and supporting infrastructure at a cost currently estimated at $5 billion.
The spaceship building will be four stories high, but continue underground. The radius of the underground portion will be much wider than the visible above-ground part. In fact, so much of the campus, parking, underground tunnels and facilities will be underground that trucks will be removing soil 24/7 for six months in order to make space for these structures.
The main building will be a marvel of innovation in heat and energy. The roof will hold 700,000 square feet of roof-mounted solar panels. That energy source, plus a natural gas facility, will provide most of the campus’s electricity. Combined with solar and wind contracts, the building will achieve a net zero energy state, meaning that it will consume the same amount that it produces.
Because the building’s exterior walls will be all glass, a crazy computerized temperature control system will open and close giant shutters and windows. “Solatubes” will pipe sunlight throughout the structure to reduce the need for electric lights.
The campus will have a four-story garage that’s massively larger than the largest parking structure in the city of San Francisco — the one at Moscone Center where Apple will stop holding announcements in favor of an underground 1,000-seat amphitheater at the new campus. The total campus will support 10,980 parking spaces.
The giant spaceship building was originally white. It has since been upgraded to black (no “gold” or “champagne” option has yet been proposed).
As Jobs emphasized at his City Council product announcement, the building will feature a historically unprecedented use of glass. The building will have nearly 4 miles of curved glass, manufactured and bent in Germany, then shipped to California in 40-feet by 26-feet sheets. These panes are being manufactured with a very sophisticated process that cold-bends them and laminates them to prevent clouding.
In the City Council rollout, Jobs said: “It’s a circle, and so it’s curved all the way around. As you know if you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building, it’s all curved. And we’ve used our experience in making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use.”
What the Critics Are Saying
The New Yorker suggested Apple’s plans are a sign of “imperial hubris,” a “twenty-first-century version of the Pentagon.”
Gizmodo said it will be “ridiculously lavish.”
And one Apple investor publicly said, “It would take some convincing for me to understand why $5 billion is the right number for a project like this.”
These neatly summarize the criticism. Basically, what they’re saying is that it’s too awesome, too far-reaching, too ambitious and too expensive. It would be better to build another set of cookie-cutter boring buildings that blight the Silicon Valley landscape.
To these critics I say: You’re wrong.
Why the Critics Need To Calm Down
The critics on this project are dead wrong, and for four reasons.
1. Utopia fuels genius. By creating a breathtaking architectural wonder, Apple will inspire its employees. You know, the people who are the sole source of everything that Apple imagines and builds. One good example of this phenomenon is Google, which smartly creates corporate campuses that are equal parts playground, Disneyland and City of Tomorrow.
2. Utopia builds the brand. Apple is an aspirational brand. Apple’s amazing spaceship HQ will become part of the iconic nature of the Apple brand, driving sales just by its very existence. When Apple announces new products, the invited press will gape at the wonder of it all, and this will ignite their worshipful gushing over whatever Apple announces. And good press is good business.
3. The new campus honors Steve Jobs. The spaceship campus was Jobs’s last vision for the company, one meant to last. While his direction and input into the iPad will quickly fade away, to be replaced by democratic decision-making and possibly a slouch toward mediocrity, the campus will serve as a reminder of the uncompromising visionary who made Apple what it is today. Who would deny this to Jobs, really — especially investors, whose wallets are burdened by the man’s vision. Besides, if you don’t want to be involved in a visionary company, sell your Apple stock and buy Exxon Mobile.
4. A visionary campus attracts top talent. It’s really hard to recruit and retain top engineering and design talent in Silicon Valley. Apple’s HQ will provide one additional incentive for the best people to stay with Apple.
Apple’s Campus 2 budget has ballooned from $3 billion to $5 billion and, guess what? It will probably grow to as high as $10 billion.
So what?
This is a company with $150 billion in cash, all of it generated by the executives and employees, many of whom will work at this campus. The new campus is good for Apple’s business, good for the environment and good for Silicon Valley.
It’s time for the critics of Apple’s spaceship Campus 2 to pipe down and marvel at Steve Jobs’s last breathtaking visionary gift.
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.
