Posted Sep 15, 2011, 1:54 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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Apple builds a suburban lemon
Read More: http://newurbannetwork.com/news-opin...suburban-lemon
Quote:
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Steve Jobs, before he stepped down as Apple's CEO, released renderings of the building, which is to have four-story walls of glass that curve continuously to form an enormous circle, over four stories of underground parking. The perimeter of the 150-acre property is to be fenced to keep the public away. "It's a little like a spaceship landed," The Times quoted Jobs as saying of the building, which is intended to hold 12,000 employees and have its own power plant, fueled by natural gas. Jobs expressed pride that Apple had chosen the design despite the fact that a curved building "is not the cheapest way to build something."
- But why, in the second decade of the 21st century, would a company choose to erect a building reminds us of spaceships from corny movies produced in the 1950s? And why would a high-tech employer want to isolate its workplace from everything except nature—this at the very time when knowledge workers in their twenties and thirties are demonstrating a strong desire for stimulating urban settings? Some aspects of the choice surely reflect the predilections of the architect, Foster + Partners. Norman Foster's firm, though celebrated, has repeatedly paid inadequate attention to human scale and urban context.
- Hawthorne, in his Times piece, nails this issue. The interesting question, he says, "is whether a place like Cupertino can maintain its low-density sprawl in future decades, as the Bay Area's population continues to grow." The Cupertino City Council's eagerness to accommodate the proposed Apple headquarters "can be read," he says, "as an endorsement of a car-dependent approach to city and regional planning that might have made sense in the 1970s but will seem irresponsible or worse by 2050."
- Quite a few of the outlying business complexes built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have suffered a loss of allure, as New Urban Network reported in June 2010. It's hard to convert a mammoth, stand-offish corporate compound to use by multiple new, smaller users. A notorious example of this is the massive Union Carbide headquarters that was built in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1982. Union Carbide did not live much longer, and by 2007 the complex, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, was worth less than half what it had cost to construct it. Apple may be making the same white-elephant mistake as Union Carbide. Even the dimensions of the park-like space inside the circle of the building are going to be unwieldy; Hess points out that "a one-third mile walk will be required to cross it from one meeting to another."
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