LA Times critic disparages Apple Campus 2 as 'retrograde cocoon' - Page 3

Obviously the world embraces both; why is everything in the mind of right-winger all about name-calling and false choices? Urban life isn't for everyone; neither is suburban or rural. Real estate in Manhattan is the most expensive of anywhere in North America - tells you something about what the market - i.e., people's demand- likes. The world needs both high-speed rail and freeways, get over your false polarizing.

That's silly. Given the size of the circle, the individual rooms can be square (with pie shaped dividers between them) or so slightly trapezoidal that you won't be able to tell that they're not rectangular.


The fundamental flaw in this is that you're assuming that Apple is creating a community. They're not building a city center. Or a mall. Or a low cost housing project. Or a public meeting place. They're building a facility for their company. Their company's needs are all that matters. And isolating the company from the community is actually a positive in many respects. In fact, this seems to provide the best of both worlds - easy access to the community while providing a private location where employees can do their job while isolated from the community.

The prototype for the "protected quadrangle" is the college quad at Oxford, which was developed during the Middle Ages as a sort of fortress to protect the scholars and books from medieval marauders. It is unfortunate that Apple feels it has to return to that prototype.

In America we invented a new type of quadrange, now used on every American campus, that has open corners and edges. By creating continuity with nature and the community, we express fundamental American values of openness and respect for the surrounding environment.

There are many secure buildings today that don't turn their backs on the world. Today we use technology for security, not 11th century planning ideas.

Xerox didn't come up with the idea of a GUI or E-mail, IM, the WWW or most everything we now take for granted, all these ideas were worked out in the 60's. Xerox just showed a way to impliment ideas for less than an arm and a leg or a million dollars. If Xerox had vanished before SJ visited, there would have still been a Mac. Maybe not by Apple but the ideas where out there and they would have been tried. Hell i remember games that incorperated the ideas of the modern GUI and they did that on 8 bit computers before the Mac.

Also "Many of the most influential and well-respected ideas in Architecture come from theorists, not practitioners." No, your just wrong there. You are so wrong it's hard to even know where to start, infact that is just BS.

That guy doesn't even live in the same "state", man...

The problem with this direction is that the urban area selected has none of the amenities to support a "non-automotive" solution. Complaining about a design that supports the conditions on the ground is ignoring what humans want and what California provides. The "Cooped-up" in suburbia is a nonsensical concept, I suppose the only freedom of movement is in a squared grid of concrete that makes it easier to herd people from one concrete locale to another for architects with socialist leanings "'...it will be so much better for you, to live as I think you should..". The folks that chose to live in a space do so, mainly by choice. This choice seems to me to be one of desire to be at Apple and be a part of that adventure. Mixing with a wide variety of people that tell them they are wrong to produce such odd things as phones and tablets, when everyone really wants a PC and rotary dial systems seem counter to the culture that has been established and cultivated at Apple. Isolation can be good. And finally, as in all circumstances - it is their $ to use as they see fit.

Should anyone care about this critic or his criticism? I think not.

fight against urban sprawl, re-create downtown in the suburbs, densify the suburbs, reduce the size of the car. This is what is said in the article, this is a European thinking. In this city it promotes public transportation in recent years with the creation of trams, or prohibiting too many parking spaces in shopping centers. It is surprising to read that in an American newspaper especially in California. This is not American culture, which is the low density, a house with a garden and a car as the preferred means of transportation such as los angeles. I read in the Los Angeles Times, saying comments "we don't want communist cities." only U.S. cities like NYC, Boston and can be other, look like to European cities, as it is the oldest, they were developed before the car is the primary mode of transport.

I read the real purpose of the design is to be the first test for potential new hires. They are told all the bathrooms in the complex are out of order, and their only option is to pee in the corner. Purportedly, their responses to the challenge will be a major part of the review process.

Okay... so this is an opinion... based on theory. A flawed opinion by the way.

If Hawthorne wants to be taken seriously then he has to give us a practical example of the theory... so the rest of us peasants can understand his highfalutin ideas.

An example like Masdar City in UAE... which, by the way, is also designed by Foster.

Strange, then, that Hawthorne and a few other critics believe that Foster would want to design the Masdar Development and then, supposedly, turn around and build the antithesis of that development... the new Apple Campus.

Maybe a little digging would have told Hawthorne that Apple City actually incorporates most of the features that his pet theory asserts (actually, his article sounds like a boy's crush on Louise Mozingo). Urban sprawl - hardly... this project does not extend the boundaries of Cupertino, the land is already being used for the same purpose, but poorly; depenence on the car - hardly... they want to link the old campus with the new by tunnels... and Apple can't be blamed for an automobile driven society... maybe cupertino and the rest of the world should catch up to Apple by providing mass transit or more cheap zero emissions vehicles (and who is to say that many of the Apple employees won't use bicycles (Foster's favourite mode of transportation); lack of mingling of the population - are you kidding... there are 12,000 people going into this campus and another few thousand at the other campus and more in the future campus... how many people are needed before we are mingling.

I could spend another day or two ripping this guy apart... but I think it's obvious that he just read a new book (Mozingo) and it made a few of his synapses pop, so he thought he'd make himself look all bright and cool to the rest of the snobs by pissing on the Apple campus.

[on edit: we could argue all year long about what is the best environment for working and living but at the end of the day we have to ask ourselves how we feel and what is our ideal. Personally, I've always liked working at home and have done so for most of my working life. If I had to go outside of the home to work then I would rather go to the Apple campus than into some busy urban maze... no matter how good it's supposed to be for my collective responsibility towards society. I really would like to see Hawthorne and/or Mozingo give us an example of how they would house 12,000 employees into their ideal framework... maybe their theories only work with an employee base below 500, but until we see an example then it's only a theory... one that may or may not work. I think Mozingo envisions a Utopia, but has absolutely no practical way of getting there without disastrous results.]

By the way... this is an interesting read:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008...roundtable.php

The opinions that count are those made by the employees who will be working there on a daily basis, not from some LA Times snob who does a drive-by hit piece.

OCD much?

You *do* understand that there are tons of other circular buildings, from skyscrapers to offices and people adjust to them just fine....

(oh, there's even a turned-90 degrees circular skyscraper, AlDar HQ).

All I know is that it better have a physical keyboard and a user replaceable battery.

I'm just trying to imagine what that would look like incorporated into the new campus...

I agree with many posters here that this design is consistent with the way we have done things in America for the past 50+ years. The new campus will be a ideal example of what American corporations and suburbs are about. Maybe there is nothing wrong with that. And, there is a good chance that the building will be beautiful, as an object, just like all Apple's products are.

But I think the LA Times critic and others here wish that the greatest American company of this era, a company that has changed for the better so much about the way we work and live, could have been as ambitious for this campus as they are for their products. As they tell us repeatedly, it is not just about the design, what really matters is the way it changes our lives and work.

It may be no coincidence that the public philanthropy issue (or lack thereof by Jobs and Apple) is also hitting the news these days. Many of us wish that Apple would act more like a forward-looking corporate citizen of the 21st century.

There is a great dissonance between Apples products (and apparent values as expressed in those products) and their behavior as a corporation.

I wish I was a photoshop guy so I could better illustrate. Cause, ya know, apple could use some help in the design dept.

Personally, as an Art student and a designer who loves architecture, I think his criticism is bizarre.

The difference between 2nd wave and 3rd wave companies was introduced in another thread a while back but it was never discussed. I think it's that difference that you are unknowingly alluding to in your comments.

I'd really like it if you'd flesh out your reasons for believing there is "great" dissonance between Apple and its products. Personally, I think that Apple is the crescendo in 2nd wave culture... taken us as far as we can go in this direction... in its corporate structure, its products and its architecture. I see little, if any, dissonance.

Jim Morrison comes to mind...

AND perfectly fits Apple's culture. So it is therefore rather appropriate.

The fellow is entitled to his opinion. It is senseless to argue about taste. He makes some good points, but we do not have to take his views as handed down from the gods on tablet computers.

I'm most intrigued by the comments that this campus won't inspire the designs of future cities. I'm no urban planner or architect, but I think it's dangerous to disregard the advantages of this structure.

Moving bodies up requires far more energy than overcoming the forces of mu and moving side to side. vertical buildings require significant portions of the structure to be devoted to this vertical movement, including stairs, elevators, plumbing and sometimes alternate fire escapes. While I've seen some wonderful renders/concept cities which use large vertical buildings to create a city in a building, where each floor is a different part of your everyday life (residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural and cultural portions each in one building) this idea is a great way to maximize the utility of each square meter of land used, but the also maximize some of the amount of energy to move about and they force people to stay in their structure as if you're on the 50th floor of one building, you'd have to go down to the bottom, go to the next building, and possibly go all the way back up.

This huge low profile circle idea has other advantages to city planning. here, vertical transportation is minimized, also minimizing the amount of structure responsible for getting us up and down the building. The circle promotes people wandering a bit in their free time. Also, as has been pointed out, the circle can have well planned paths which dissect the building, encouraging people to step outside and get some vitamin d as well as drastically cutting down on transportation time. Open and continous greens space is highlighted in this design and it does so without becoming majorly inconvenient.

If future cities were designed in one giant beltway with huge gardens in the middle, I think there could be strong potential for that succeeding. Particularly if you consider having concentric loops of building space , keeping everything close, but little impeding your movement around the structure.

Uh, Yes, actually - he's an architecture critic. On the other hand, what's your qualification for criticizing him?

I think his main concern is the idea that with this design we are moving from one cocoon (home) in a cocoon (car) to another cocoon (office)... totally divorcing us from any interaction with the rest of the collective... but I think that idea totally negates the idea that we are thinking beings. Quite a few critics (Snobs) forget that other people can also think.

I tend to believe that if we can make the home and office environments as tolerable as possible then we as individuals will be happier and therefore more willing to socialize and to spend more time with people in our communities.

There's a huge-a$$ parking garage forming a wall hundreds of yards long along Interstate 280.

I was much more supportive of the new campus before I began diving into the details, such as the size and location of the parking garage. The more I examined the entire proposal, the less I liked it -- why can't the parking be underground? why not do a 6-story building and obviate the need for campus 3? with all of Apple's money, why not do something even better - a Geery Apple HQ, for instance?

Uh, what do you suppose makes up office walls? Every office wall in 99% of the buildings in the world are drywall. (The rest are glass, bamboo or plywood.) Do you think Steve's going to build this out of transparent aluminum?

"we express fundamental American values of openness and respect for the surrounding environment. "

You're kidding, right?

Uh, why? Did this guy single-handedly create L.A.'s car culture? Did he force every Angeleno, decades ago, to vote against public transit and build freeways?

Don't be so snide and simple, it just negates anything substantive might you have to say.

Hawthorne's misunderstanding could not be more profound.

Apple is not turning its back on the civic environment, it's building in "downtown" Cupertino. What does he want, a skyscraper in San Jose?

Apple's imperative is to maintain its connection is to the world at large, to make things that the entire world uses to amplify their minds. Making such products requires free, open, but still grounded minds to do the designing and marketing.

For that mindset you need trees, open space, a minimum of boxes, a building for the right brain. You don't want left-brained cubes and rectangles, or some Gehry-like, irrational, tour de force. You want repose, a quiet, meditative space that allows you to connect with nature both visually and tactilely, if that's a word.

That's what this building is about. It's an Apple product for designing Apple products.

To ask that it engage with a fictitious urban environment in Cupertino is sophomoric.

Kidding himself, as usual, on this subject.

Very well said. The new campus is perfect for what it is - a suburban office campus - but I'd like to think that Apple could do more than simply perfect an existing solution; I'd like to think they could come up with something that breaks the mold.

As an L.A. Times subscriber I read the entire article. What the AI posting left out I found to be the most interesting . . . and problematic. The first part of Hawthorne's piece was devoted to implying that Steve was presenting the building as though he had designed it--by his never mentioning the architects by name. The fact that the firm's name was stamped all over each sheet presented notwithstanding. It came across to me like those folks who kept carping about the White House "refusing" to release President Obama's "original" birth certificate. Hawthorne seemed to want Steve to bring the "original" architect to the meeting to take a bow. Anything less being some effort to "cover up" the truth. Left a bad taste in my mouth, and caused me to receive the rest of the piece with much more skepticism.

His piece was not so much an architectural critique as it was the intellectual exercise of shining some light on otherwise obscure architectural theories. Not a bad thing in itself, but framed as it was, came across as unreasonable carping.

Half of the parking is underground... and there will be a row of trees between the 280 and the "parking wall".

One real beef will come from bicycle crowd who use Pruneridge as a quieter cycling street. That will disappear to become the entrance to the underground parking and further down the campus that is where the auditorium and fitness centre will sit... and that is in complete contradiction to what I believe should be Apple's goal, limit car traffic and encourage bicycle traffic.

Ironic that someone from LA is castigating the fact that the building relies too much on the car. If anyone would know about a suburban wasteland, it should be someone from LA. The building isn't in a dense urban environment that would lend itself well to public transportation or alternative means of transportation.

I think they are breaking the mold... housing 13,000 employees is no easy task and I think Apple's solution is a lot more elegant than most, if not all, companies.

My biggest beef is with the use of emission producing automobiles, the bane of my existence... but I don't think Apple could fix that problem with any design. Maybe the gang at Apple will develop the iCar or iTransit at some point in the future.

What a whiner. Leave it to California where liberals complain about other liberals. I'm not an Apple apologist, but this guy is out to lunch.

1. What is wrong with a suburban setting?

2. Old fashioned? It wouldn't matter what shape was chosen, this guy would dig back through history to find something to compare it to, and still call it old fashioned.

3. I agree is has a decidedly 60-70's look to it. Is there something wrong with that?

4. Apple is one of the "greenest" companies around. The new campus will be replacing old HP buildings which means reuse of existing developed land, and they will be planting more trees and plants than any other company is ever likely to do. It will also be fueled with as much "green" energy sources as possible...

5. This guy uses cars as an argument against Apple's environmental efforts? What a bone-head. First, where in the world can you put a building where people won't need cars to get there? Oh that's right, nowhere. Get a clue. The world has been built around cars. No amount of wishful thinking is going to change that. People are NEVER going to give up their cars. Just accept that and get back to reality. Second, this campus replaces a previous company's campus. It should not have a significant impact on traffic from when HP's folks were working at capacity. If anything, with the improved building design, and how Apple will probably manage worker hours, traffic congestion will be reduced compared to times past.

6. His use of "pastoral capitalism" as an argument suggests that if he had his way, everyone would work in big cities. Guess what dude, not everyone wants to do that. A great deal of folks have indeed "turned their back" on cities - it's because they've figured out that big cities suck. Another factoid that you're just going to have to wrap your brain around and get used to, is that lots of people want to get out of big cities.

7. This was an interesting phrase: "Apple's campus... keeps itself aloof from the world around it to a degree that is unusual even in a part of California dominated by office parks." So, Chris, what, you're a conformist then? Or maybe a communist? Maybe Apple wants to stay a bit detached from the noise, congestion and commotion going on around them, so they can focus on their work in a quiet, peaceful environment. Once again you paint this as a negative. What the heck is wrong with it?

You can certainly house 12,000 employees in an urban setting. I'm working in a building right now for a media company that is nowhere near any of the largest, but there are 3000 employees and there are 100 more buildings down the same avenue with similar numbers.

While I don't agree with everything Hawthorne says, I do agree that there are tremendous advantages to a society where its workers interact with each other in a streetscape with everything that entails: restaurants, cafes, cultural centers, parks, etc. The problem with suburban settings isn't the settings or architecture itself (even though it's frequently dull) - it's that workers walk out of their office and into their cars, drive home and never interact with anything else. That's the difference between what I call "live downtowns" like New York, Boston and maybe San Francisco and "dead downtowns", where the place rolls up after 6pm and you never see any pedestrians on the street.

That's why many new suburban developments are moving towards mixed used (retail, office, residential) that include "town centers" and modes of human interaction and away from the shopping mall, big box stores and strip malls that constitute much of American suburban development today.

I'm biased because I prefer cities, but the reason I do so is because I want something more to life than driving everywhere, shopping malls, gas stations and chain stores (although our cities are also devolving into chain store meccas). We used to have distinctive architectures and environments in this country - now almost all suburbia look pretty much the same - like New Jersey.

Exactly. Departing from the rectalinear environment in which our species evolved is foolish. Human beings are too detached from our environment already - we need to return to the comforting right angles of the natural world.

Taken from someone who lives in and (probably) loves the concrete jungle.... and coming from someone so close to tinseltown that he probably worships the pretentious, the audacious and the pseudointellectualist... I'd say his critique is predictable.
The design is a minimalist and environmental tribute to, not only the company, but the man that built it. The campus at 1 Infinite Loop is similar in that it's a structure surrounding an atrium of sorts.

What would have been pretentious and audacious and, probably loved by critiques of his ilk, would have been a building, shaped like the Apple logo and been ten floors of mirrored glass surrounded by a hardscape of reflection pools and fountains.

LOL WUT? The parking IS underground

Respect for the environment is a "fundamental American value"?

You must also remember that Apple is a publicly owned company with a responsibility to its shareholders... 4 buildings housing 3000 people each in a highly taxed urban setting and can Apple find a space where that is even possible... hmmmm....

I know what you are saying... and, to some extent, I agree... but who says we have to mix and mingle and create a real community feeling. Is that idea in itself not a dream of days gone past... the agrarian village... the tribal home... are we confusing our working environment with our living environment. Do they have to be one and the same?

Believe me... I don't know the answer... but I like to live and work in a peaceful setting. My home, although in the middle of an urban setting, is quite idyllic but yet very close to one of the most lively cultural settings in our city. I don't think it's the workplace that has to be changed... I think it's the area where we live that needs to be more progressive.