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NE.WS DESK

APPLE'S NEW HEADQUARTERS

By Paul Goldberger
September 20, 2011

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.

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. 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 P-lace, because plans must be presented to the local authorities
doktrin
in CuP-ertino, who understandably are falling all over themselves with delight. 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. 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.

Foster has proposed a gargantuan glass-and-metal ring, four stories high, with a hole in the middle a third of a mile wide. 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. 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. But buildings aren't
interpretatif
spaceships, any more than they are iPhones.

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. (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. 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. With this building, there seems to be very little
doktrin
sense of any connection to human size. 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.
interpretatif
Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, was one of the first to write about the new AP-P-le building. 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. I suppose Apple has solved enough problems over the years that it may not be
systematic
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.

When Apple started opening retail stores, most of which have been designed by the firm of Bohlin Cprinski 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 still feel that
way; their pristine glass box on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is the best Apple store yet. But that place is a tiny cottage compared
to the proposed new headquarters.

When companies plan wildly ambitious, over-the-top headquarters, it is sometimes a sign of imperial hubris. A.T. & T. was broken up
not too long after it moved into Johnson and Burgee's famously grandiose "Chippendale skyscraper" on Madison Avenue. General Foods
did not last too long after taking occupancy of the glass-and-metal palace Kevin Roche designed for it in Westchester County, and
Union Carbide fell apart after it moved into another Roche building in Danbury, Connecticut. The New York Times Company's stock
price plummeted after it moved into its Renzo Piano building on Eighth Avenue, and they now lease the home they built for themselves.

Architecture isn't in itself a cause of corporate decline-that notion is ridiculous-but overbearing buildings can sometimes be a
symptom of companies losing touch with reality, and this problem will manifest itself in other ways. It's said that Steve Jobs considers
this building to be a key part of his legacy, which would be unfortunate, because it would mean that his last contribution to his company
might well be his least meaningful.

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