![]() Not every Apple employee will get to work in the new building-ouch!-but 12,000 will. And if it never rains again (this being California), well, an arborist selected thousands of drought-tolerant new trees for the 175-acre site. The toroid glass of the roof curves scientifically to shed rainwater. The greatest! They are, as my colleague Steven Levy writes, precision-milled aluminum rails that attach to glass doors-sliding and swinging alike-with no visible bolts.Įverything in this building is the best. Such design can be impressive, but ultimately it comes with a cost.The new headquarters Apple is building in Cupertino has the absolute best door handles. I’ll bet that Steve Jobs appreciated the sleek design-even the parking lots were beautiful from a distance. This building was a beautiful sculptural object, more like a computer chip than a spaceship, and it also had a massive amount of parking. And think about all of the secrets that must be kept on Wall Street.Īpple Park reminds me a lot of Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, which I was fortunate enough to visit in the late 1980s with a friend. Amazon, another tech innovator, builds urban campuses. There must be better ways to maintain secrets. When Apple shareholders met at the headquarters, they were refused tours by CEO Tim Cook, because “we have so much confidential stuff around.” The Pentagon offers tours, or did until they were recently suspended due to Covid. The Pentagon may more accessible than Apple Park. Apple headquarters (not including parking garages), compared to Pentagon and other large structures. In fact, Apple Park is on the scale of the Pentagon. Apparently, the goal was secrecy and control, much like the Pentagon. Layout of plan by Shay and Amir LevanonĪ plan like that could have transformed Cupertino-providing a walkable urban downtown that is far more sustainable. That plan didn’t require massive parking garages, each more than a quarter mile long, with 6,000 parking spaces. Two Israeli architecture students at the time, Shay Levanon and Amir Levanon, students of Hillel Shocken, drew up a plan that envisioned the campus as a large downtown. ![]() New urbanists in Northern California offered their services to Apple to design a mixed-use campus that is integrated with the surrounding city-to no avail. That demands parking on the scale of a large airport. But the vast majority will travel by personal automobile. Sure, there are buses, a more efficient motor vehicle, taking people in and out. ![]() The design itself requires a motor vehicle for every trip. The massive solar panels on the roofs are so much greenwashing.Ĭupertino, California, imposed parking requirements that Apple complied to, but in this case I don't think the city can be blamed for all of this parking. Those employees and visitors are traveling long distances to work-not taking transit, walking or biking. But you really can’t hide the truth that Apple requires everybody to drive in, and drive out. The parking garages are beautiful as sculptural objects, with all curved edges visible on the exterior, including the vertical and horizontal concrete facade elements. To put that in perspective, Disneyland is the same square footage of all the parking at Apple Park,” writes Hayden Clarkin, The Transit Guy on Twitter. “Apple's Park in Cupertino has so much space dedicated to car storage that you can fit all 272 Apple USA retail locations inside of its parking structures. Our collective attention spans are short in 2022, and Apple’s massive office building landed like a spaceship in the sprawl of Silicon Valley more than four years ago-but we shouldn’t forget its cost. It’s a pity that Apple chose a 20th Century model for construction of its headquarters. ![]()
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