LA Times critic disparages Apple Campus 2 as 'retrograde cocoon' - Page 8

Maybe within the next thirty years Apple will have released some of the land surrounding the complex and retail, office and living space will develop around the campus... and the replica gherkin will have been completed in its center.

After the apocalypse, it could be very much in demand for its natural lighting.

The majority will be existing employees by the time 2015 rolls around. Apple is leasing even more space in Cupertino this year. In addition, the 9500 HP employees that used to work there now drive to Palo Alto. There's no real difference in congestion.

The people whining about traffic congestion have to realize there was 9800 parking spaces in the old office park. Plus Apple runs their own bio-diesel busses (20 of them) from SF, santa cruz and other locations to bring folks in which I doubt HP was doing.

The plans show 4600 parking stalls under the building, 4300 parking spaces in the garage, 100+ stalls for visitors (the PDF is hard to read there) and Jobs' presentation showed 1200 surface parking spaces. Seems like around 9000 covered spaces and another 1200 surface spaces.

So around 400ish more parking spaces vs HP. The 1200 surface spaces largely looks like it is meant to serve the conference center based on their location.

There might be parking under the research facilities but they aren't marked. You can see roads leading to what looks like tunnels.

There is designated bike parking at every entrance.

http://cdn.macrumors.com/images-new/...andscaping.pdf


Tell you what, lets meet at the Pentagon metro stop and I'll watch as you walk right up to the Pentagon walls before encountering any security (I'm pretty sure that security will be encountering you). There's a perimeter fence on the south side as well.

Of course you can walk right up to an ENTRANCE. That's what they are for.


The PTC is not IN the Pentagon but in the south (east) parking lot as a separate structure. It's been that way since 2001 (planning was before 9/11). Acting as a regional transit point is NOT a function of the Pentagon itself.

Stating that the Pentagon building is "transit oriented" is idiotic. It is, at most, a tertiary function of the Pentagon reservation.

In any case there is an "Apple Transit Center" located just east of the Apple HQ in the plans. It's marked as private but the VTA buses have to stop somewhere.


It's a stretch regardless. How many times have you gone to the Pentagon building itself? The Pentagon has NEVER been an integrated part of the Arlington community except as a major employer. At most you can point to the marathons and other events that use the parking areas to stage.

Apple will likely allow certain usage of the green space and conference center for similar kinds of civic activities. Just not near the building itself.

Other than his opinion (which can't be right or wrong) what is right about it?


Ah, yes he is. He rails endlessly about car dependency and the anti-civic nature of the design. He suggests that the car-dependent design is will be deemed "irresponsible or worse by 2050".

He calls it a retrograde cocoon. That's saying the design is bad or wrong.


The Apple HQ would fit in the L'Enfant plan in as much as it like a large monument placed in a green space. One of the reasons why the L'Enfant plan works is that as a capital city the main boulevards were designed wide and as much green space preserved as possible. Even the grid streets were designed fairly wide.

A lot of the clutter was removed in 1901 by the power of Congress to pretty much decree whatever it wanted (after all the political maneuvering was complete anyway). The McMillian plan pretty much nuked slums and replaced them with governmental buildings and parks. Your 1906 townhouse was likely one of the results.

There might not have been cars but they used run a railroad through the heart of the mall, not to mention trolley lines and such. Thank Burnham (and back room deals) for moving that to the Union Station location.

In many respects the current DC owes as much to McMillian and Burnham as L'Enfant.

Some of the buildings, and many of those spaces have been empty for several years (as can be seen in several different years of Historical Imagery in Google Earth).


Wrong. There is no perimeter fence. Anyone can walk or drive freely onto the grounds at places like Columbia Pike or Fern Street (this is easy to see in Google Street View). Anyone can enter on a bike on the west side, and ride around to leave on the northeast without stopping (exiting through Lady Bird Johnson Park). It's about the only way to get to the 14th Street Bridge by bike from that area, and I've done it myself.

The Pentagon grounds include a major public transit facility, and they don't have as much controlled area, or the perimeter fence, that Apple is proposing for it's new campus.

What you should be pointing out is that while the area around the Pentagon is mostly parking lots, the new Apple campus will trasform an area with parking lots and 20% landscaping, to one with 80% landscaping. As I've said, in many ways it's a big improvement.

My house is not a result of the McMillian plan, which was based on the original L'Enfant plan, focused on public parks and boulevards, and used examples from European cities that "give pleasure from generation to generation, and even century to century." The McMillian Commission said that, at the time, "The original plan of the city of Washington, having stood the test of a century, has met universal approval. The departures from that plan are to be regretted and, wherever possible, remedied." The commission also included Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of many great parks, including Central Park in New York.

I don't like back room deals, and there's no need to remind me of the power of Congress, as DC is the home of Taxation Without Representation, with half-a-million of us having no vote in Congress, but forced to endure that type of interference from them in our affairs. I certainly do have some love for Burnham, the starchitect and urban planner who designed Union Station.

Mid-20th-century car-focused redevelopment lost that broader civic focus on the "metropolitan realm." In DC, this resulted in things like closing 4th Street SW to build the isolated and failed Waterside Mall on top of it--recently demolished to allow the street to be reopened. The nearby Rockville Mall is another failed example, also demolished to reopen the streets and replace it with Rockville Town Center--to great success.

The new Apple campus has more in common with mid-century urban renewal efforts than the earlier City Beautiful movement of McMillian and Burnham. The design of the new campus accomplishes the nostalgic objectives that Steve Jobs set out for it. While "Retrograde Cocoon" may be a bit smart-assed or trollish, a case has been made for the design being retro, and many of the folks defending it are celebrating it's cocoon-like aspects. These criticisms are actually valid, and don't necessarily mean the design is bad or wrong overall. No one has said it's not an improvement over what's there now.

The shock and disbelief in response to any criticism of Apple's new campus show how inured we all are to the paradigms of sprawl.

Then give it a try. You claim you can walk right up to the building. Go for it. No street view BS, just do it since you are so adamant it's so accessible.

I'll read about you in the washington post.


The grounds do yes. The building itself no.

As far as perimeter fence lines go, really so what? Do you visit the Pentagon parking lots for fun?


So what? Parking lots or not it's STILL not integrated into the neighborhood. A point you keep dodging as well as direct questions like when was the last time you actually went to visit the building that is supposedly held as the comparable model of being "integrated" into the community.

Answer, you haven't, it isn't and the point is complete bullshit.

Please. The reason Rockville Mall failed was because they never managed to get decent stores. Rockville Town Center replaced a poorly run mall mall with various other buildings to serve other purposes. It could hardly suck more...great success? Eh, it's nice but not something I'd bother to visit unless I lived very nearby. Even then I'd still be driving to the big box stores like Costco, Best Buy, Home Depot on 355 as well as the two area malls...Mongomery and White Flint.

Living in Rockville and not owning a car is not optimal.

"Great success" is like Tysons. I drive to Tysons sometimes even from Columbia. But oh noes, that's an example of car-focused development and suburbia!

Ballston Mall sits in the middle of Ballston, a fairly nice area to live. The difference between Ballston and Rockville is it actually had anchor stores that didn't suck. Not because of some failure of being car-focused. Ballston has metro right next to it along with a bunch of residences but still has a huge parking garage.

Columbia Mall is pretty much the focus for Columbia. Sure there are village centers but if there isn't a good anchor supermarket they're dying. Wilde Lake Village center comes to mind. Funny, people prefer to drive to the stores they like over tiny stores they don't.

If you want successful urban malls you can look at Boston's mall at the Prudential building (whatever its called...Prudential something?) or Houston's Galleria. If Rockville Mall had the anchor stores that White Flint initially had it would still exist. It would have been the destination mall that White Flint was for a long time before it's decline. But OMG, yes, you'd have to freaking drive there if you didn't live on a metro line.

Where Waterside Mall failed Mazza Gallerie still exists. Frankly Waterside just sucked as a building. That was more the cause of its failure as opposed to "malls in urban areas don't work".

So congrats, you found two examples of urban malls that failed, one of which was a terribly architected brutalist reinforced concrete building (seemingly built to withstand a nuclear "event") and the other was a mall that never had stores that didn't suck while ignoring two successful malls in the same cities.


It's actually highly functional. Apple and Jobs are the antithesis of nostalgic and any analysis that draws the conclusion that Steve's objectives has anything to do with nostalgia is clearly deeply flawed.


Again, Apple isn't retro. Why on earth would Apple do retro? It wouldn't. So any "case" is again, flawed and simply projection of the critic's own biases.


Except they aren't valid since they are based on an incorrect premise.


No, it's just been the criticisms have been completely wrong (it would take you hours to walk to a meeting), misguided (the objective is to be retro/nostalgic), snide (retrograde cocoon), arrogant (you don't have the expertise to discuss) or single/simple minded (sprawl bad, therefore all car focused buildings bad).

I like living in the city. I like living in the suburbs. I like living in planned communities. They ALL have their advantages and disadvantages. The speaking in terms of a "paradigm of sprawl" is IMHO just a way of being snooty about how awesome you are for living in the city as opposed to being a suburbanite. Meh.

So Street View is BS because it shows that your claim that "There's a perimeter fence on the south side" is wrong?

Anyone can freely enter the grounds and walk up to a building entrance, if you've reserved a tour you'll even get inside, if you otherwise ask about one they should just tell you that you need to make a reservation on their webstite in adavance. http://pentagon.osd.mil/tour-selection.html

There will be no security incident or Washington Post article.

I expalined in detail why I've been through the grounds on a bicycle, without needing to pass through a fence or security. The last time I was inside the building was many years ago. The last time I visited the grounds was a few months ago, with a friend to visit the memorial. He parked in the Pentagon's lot, even though I warned him that I didn't think it was allowed. He has a minor handicap, but I see that even handicaped parking isn't allowed where he parked, and no one questioned us or bothered his car.

A major public bus and rail transit center is an integral part of the community. So what if it's not inside the building itself? The building was designed with a tunnel that originally allowed public buses to drive right through the building. The grounds of the Pentagon are simply not enclosed or locked-down like you've been suggesting, and don't include the perimter fence Apple is proposing for it's new campus.

Hawthorne's review seems to have left the building... so to speak.

Speaking of tunnels... did you see that Apple plans on having a tunnel to connect the 2 campuses (campi?)? Just pointing that out because I think it will be interesting to see how they'll pull that off.

I described them as examples of "Mid-20th-century car-focused redevelopment". I mentioned nothing about shopping malls in urban areas or how they "don't work." What I did say, was how they're both examples of failed "urban renewal," where isolated developments were built on closed streets, and how that had more in common with the new Apple campus than the older projects you brought up earlier.

Closing streets to add a large isolated development diverts the increased traffic to surrounding streets, making them more like busy arterial roads that are difficult to navigate without a car.


At the introduction of Apple's new campus to the city council, they discussed how Steve Jobs grew up near the campus (in the house where he and Steve Wozniak started Apple, and his stepmother now lives). Steve explained how important it is that the new campus will allow Apple to stay in Cupertino, and why the land for the new campus is "special" to him. Steve told the story of how, as a young teenager, Hewlett and Packard were his idols, and when he called Bill Hewlett to chat, Bill gave him a job, close to the time when Hewlett-Packard first bought property at the location of the new campus (where Wozniak later worked). He explained how it used to be apricot orchards, and that Apple hired an arborist to help them add trees, and replace some of the old apricot orchards. This story resonated with at least one member of the council, who said how interesting Steve's "throwback" to HP was to him personally, because he worked for HP for 35 years, and mostly on that campus.

So, not only does Steve Jobs "do retro," when hes describing the nostalgic importance of the location, he's really good at it. He reiterated several times the importance of the new campus in allowing Apple to remain in Cupertino and contain their growing staff, so that Apple won't need to move away from the place where it was born.


You seem to imagine yourself as having a special gift for determining that people really mean something very different than what they actually say (handy for constructing straw men). Your "humble" opinion that I'm "being snooty" is a good example of how seeing humble in an acronym is a good indication that the following statement will be ironic.

Yeah--I hope we're done with stuff like the Pentagon, and how to best manage a shopping mall.


That's just silly, they'd probably need billions of... um... Well, they might have enough money, but methinks they'd use that to build something more practical first--like a new Samsung maybe?

Perhaps the iPhone 9 will be ready when the campus opens--with mini-hoverboard features for the ultimate in transportation--everyone will want one for each foot.

But seriously, it'll be easy to just have Apple Transit buses make frequent trips between the two campuses.

Seriously, this has got to be one of the longest tails on any thread on this site. Usually when a posting is this old it gathers only random spam posts from Chinese accounting software companies.

But since I am here, did anyone see the recent NOVA episode on the IBM supercomputer, Watson? They showed the IBM Watson Research Center in New York and sure looked like the proposed Apple one.



Look familiar?

The only similarity is that it has a curved face. It's not even a donut:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ex...4506VV2043.jpg

The Apple "space ship" doesn't have vertical posts breaking up the exterior like that:
http://images.gizmag.com/gallery_lrg/spaceship-18.jpg

The IBM building doesn't have the prominent horizontal ledges either.

Your recurring theme is that car-focus is bad. Either way you ignored mall examples that are car focused that are successful.

These two "urban renewal" projects have very very little in common with the new Apple HQ. For one thing Apple's HQ isn't in an urban requirement. The primary commonality is that they are "car focused" despite the fact they all had secondary transit mechanisms.

You picked malls for whatever reason. There are many OTHER examples of urban renewal that are car focused that you could have drawn from.


Apple's campus is not in an urban environment and does not make surrounding streets more like busy arterial roads...especially given that one of the adjoining "streets" is an interstate highway.

The requirement that a facility be easy to reach by foot or bike is not a universal one. Nor is being car-focused a design flaw. Also, being car-focused is NOT why these two malls failed.


This has zero to do with building or product design. Neither Steve nor Apple has acknowledged milestone dates like 30th anniversary of the mac since his return. They are not nostalgic in the sense of preservation or glorifying the past (a yearning for the past). This is not the same as not having any sense or appreciation of history. Both Steve and Apple are forward looking, not nostalgic.

His other comments basically said "I grew up here, I like this place, I prefer we stay". Translating that into the Apple HQ architecture is based on nostalgia is idiotic.


That's not retro. Retro is deliberately styling something to resemble the past. Like some car designs are designed to resemble the same cars from the 50s and 60s. The Apple HQ is not retro.


Don't bring stuff up if you can't defend them.

Look again. It's BS because there's a perimeter fence on the south. How do I know that? Because evidently you didn't realize that the memorial is on the south west corner. On the south side facing the parking lot is a standoff that keeps folks channeled toward the entrances. What you think you see as an entrance from street view isn't. It's steps up to a walkway that takes you to the entrance. You can't approach the building unless you pass either a gate or use the two walkways.

You can't just walk right up to a window in the building.

Is Apple's perimeter wider? Sure. Again, so what?


It matters because you said that the BUILDING is a mixed use BUILDING. It makes the TRANSIT CENTER part of the community...for transit anyway. Apple has a transit center on the grounds as well.


Again, try walking up to the building itself. Not an entrance, to the building. The grounds encompass a public memorial and parking lots. So yes, it's not as locked down as other facilities but the building security is very tight. There is a perimeter fence to prevent people from "walking right up to the building" EXCEPT at entrances. Even there, it's designed with security in mind.

Can you get a tour? Sure. So what? I can get a tour of the white house.

One issue for this project, and those mentioned earlier, is isolation when streets are closed and connections to the surrounding community are limited; this diverts traffic around the development, and funnels traffic through busier limited connections. The Pentagon has about 8 unrestricted entrances where cars can freely drive onto the grounds, and a subway station. Apple’s new campus has two restricted entrances for cars, and one for the private Apple transit center (shown with the perimeter fence across it’s entrance).

I'm wondering if they are going to allow Apple to close Pruneridge. It was a hot topic at the EIR scoping meeting.

I bet they won't let it be closed and they'll make Apple come up with an alternate plan.

It wouldn't be the worst place top eliminate a through street ever. Access to the east of the campus is served by a closer 280 interchange, and Pruneridge can still serve as a main artery into the campus as it currently does for the existing HP buildings. Pruneridge to the the west of the proposed campus is a whole one block deep on the other side of N Wolfe. The campus is right where Pruneridge dies as a thoroughfare anyway.

A small pocket of folks in the neighborhood directly west of Wolfe wouldn't be able to use Pruneridge to go east, they would use Homestead instead. The rest of the world is either unaffected or just needs to pick the closest 280 exit to where they want to go.

I've seen main arteries closed to make room for big-box stores, and it hopelessly screws up the neighborhood for blocks around because the main artery was exactly that. Here it is different, 280 is the main artery, Pruneridge is just a significant feeder street into an industrial block. It's not the main sole way top get from one side of town to the other, and it can still function as the main feeder into a redistributed industrial block.

As an early post said, Hawthorne's review ruffled a few feathers here, but Appleinsider's discussion of Apple's new campus is the best I've seen, and there are interesting things to discuss beyond initial reactions to the criticism.



It looks like part of a Mies van der Rohe version of Apple's building (though Mies was a very rectilinear kind of guy, who also built stuff for IBM).

The Watson Research Center is shaped like a section of Apple's building, and would be a similar size if it was a complete circle. You can see the similarity from above. http://maps.google.com/?ll=41.209817...h&vpsrc=6&z=16

The architect was Eero Saarinen, who also designed cool and familiar things like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Dulles Airport, and the Tulip chair.

It provides some idea of what the view will be like from Apple's building--though much better, of course, through curved and almost seamless glass.


Long Walk by Roger Smith, on Flickr

Sadly, it is a main bicycle route (quieter)... and none of the other routes can replace that.

... but, yes, they'd still have to use Homestead at some point anyway.

In that case, a condition to have a bicycle path through the portion between 280 and the building would make sense, and a good neighbor thing to do.

I expect it will go through as planed. The mayor has already said "there's no chance we're saying no," and others on the council seem equally dazeled.

While Cupertino should certainly accommodate it's largest employer and taxpayer to some extent, closing Pruneridge and any changes to zoning, are significant things to ask for. Effects on the surrounding community shouldn't be ignored, and the design has a big impact on how positive or negative those effects are. Pruneridge covers an area the size of some of the exsisting buildings, and I assume they'll need to purchase it, but haven't seen anything about that.


That might be a good idea, but it would be difficult to squeeze between the ramp to underground parking and the southwest edge of the building, so I think it's doubtful that will happen.

Making a 12-15 foot change to the site plan before any dirt is dug should be doable all around, especially as a condition of closing the public road easement.

It must also be noted that there will only be access to the housing development from one side when Pruneridge is closed. Not sure how much of a problem that will be. Steve's probably pissed at them for not selling.

Another similar building is the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) building. A British intelligence agency, this place really is locked down.

Also a four-story building, but smaller and less attractive (as Lucy Van Pelt would say, bleah.)





Look familiar?