LA Times architecture critic slams "spaceship"
In today's Mercury News:
In today's Mercury News:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_18674606?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com (quoted in entirety)
Opinion: Apple's 'spaceship' so far doesn't sound like a model of office building architecture
By John Pastier
Special to the Mercury News
Posted: 08/14/2011 08:00:00 PM PDT
Early in June, Apple's head honcho Steve Jobs paid a surprise visit to the Cupertino City Council. He showed slides of a new multibillion-dollar company headquarters embracing more than 3 million square feet, with about as much space devoted to parking. "It's a little like a spaceship landed," he quipped about its circular shape, adding that "we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world."
That's a long shot. The architectural world is less sanguine than some of the mass media and local politicians. The preliminary concept as shown doesn't support the claim of world's best. It could have been produced by a talented student over a caffeine-fueled weekend. It's unlikely that an isolated suburban megastructure could be the best office building in the world.
What would it take to meet Jobs' goal? Lifting the secrecy that shrouds the enterprise is key.
Apple won't answer questions about the project beyond the fuzzy video of Jobs' slide show on the city's website. For this to be a Silicon Valley paradigm, educating the public about the design's rationale and evolution would seem a given. Apple has met with city staff, but no documents have been made public in the ten weeks since Jobs' public presentation. It's important to know the project's full scope and impact, including how much parking it will create. The present headquarters suggests about 10,000 spaces and 3.5 million square feet.
Next would be to rethink the premise of a circle nearly a mile in circumference.
A building that large would undercut Jobs' goal of human scale -- imagine how un-intimate its 3,000-seat "cafe" would be. An inflexible and unexp[a]ndable circle is the opposite of what's needed in a facility for a constantly evolving industry. If a huge circular shape insured architectural excellence, we'd see far more big, round buildings than we do.
If innovation is valued, does perpetuating a conventional suburban approach advance that goal? How does this arbitrary shape grow out of and relate to its setting and context? Its gigantic, rigid form will apparently swallow up a major street, Pruneridge Avenue. Is it a good idea to devote 160 acres to an office monoculture, or might the project be leavened by adding uses such as short-term lodging for employees and clients, and a first-rate computer academy?
Jobs spoke at length about window glazing, describing it as curved, expensive, and using the world's largest sheets of architectural glass, but he was mum about workplace quality and the employee experience. Will the spaceship provide an alternative to the industry's ubiquitous cubicles? Will it foster staff interaction and creative exchange? Will navigating miles of corridors help productivity?
Here Apple can learn from Facebook. The social networking upstart is remodeling a tech campus in Menlo Park to create human-scaled social spaces and using overhead garage doors to open up spaces to a walkable main street inspired by a Barcelona boulevard. This employee-centered, interactive approach seems more promising than a mechanistic sci-fi vision.
The spaceship will generate its own power and presumably have some green features, but, oddly, the power plant will rely on fossil fuel rather than renewable energy sources. Ironically, Apple's architect, the British superstar Norman Foster, recently designed a fully sustainable, auto-free, zero-carbon city for 50,000 residents, called Masdar, near Abu Dhabi. Clearly, he hasn't been asked to fully flex his ecological muscles in Cupertino.
Furthermore, neither Jobs nor Apple has ever mentioned Foster's name in connection with their project. This makes one wonder how deeply they value architectural distinction.
JOHN PASTIER, the Los Angeles Times' first architecture critic, has been writing about design since 1969 and recently was a juror for a design competition for the 79-story headquarters of the PetroVietnam oil company in Hanoi. He lives in San Jose and wrote this for this newspaper.
