Kanskje styret i Apple stanser galskapen, og i stedet satser på en fleksibel "Epleby" i menneskelig skala? En slik by bør ha cafeer på gateplan fremfor kantiner, være tilgjengelig for offentligheten, ha god kollektivtransport og inkludere boliger. Med andre ord en nettverksbasert utbygging i ånden fra www, fremfor monolittisk hybris.
Apple burde ta inspirasjon fra det dynamiske mangfoldet i "the Big Apple", New York, ikke fra Pentagons lukkede verden.
Apple er ikke alene om å ville krone kommersiell suksess med at gigentisk byggverk På Fornebo er Statoil i ferd med å oppføre et massivt, truende kontorkompleks basert på tilsvarende ideer. Se bilde nederst.
Goldbergers kommentar er gjengitt nedenfor
Audun Engh
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Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker:
Apple's new headquarters
---"However elegant the headquarters might turn out to be, it will still be a huge suburban office complex, reinforcing car culture at a time when that seems increasingly less tenable."
--- "The genius of the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, and other Apple products is that they are tools that function well and happen to be breathtakingly beautiful.. A building is also a tool, but of a very different sort. In architecture, scale—the size of various parts of a building in proportion to one another and to the size of human beings—counts for a lot. With this building, there seems to be very little sense of any connection to human size. Flexibility is a hallmark of the iPad, and it counts in architecture, too, but how much flexibility is there in a vast office governed entirely by geometry? For all of Foster’s sleekness, this Apple building seems more like a twenty-first-century version of the Pentagon."
Article link:
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full text below
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APPLE’S NEW HEADQUARTERS
I don’t usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren’t yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn’t look great as a model? Still, it’s hard not to comment on the new headquarters that Apple plans to build in Cupertino, California.
With Apple’s characteristic secrecy, the company hasn’t officially released the design, or announced that the architect is Foster + Partners, the London-based firm known for its super-sleek, elegant, exquisitely detailed buildings. But images of Apple’s future home, to be built on a campus that it has taken over from Hewlett-Packard, are all over the place, because plans must be presented to the local authorities in Cupertino, who understandably are falling all over themselves with delight. Foster may be the best large architectural practice around today, a firm that has done remarkably well at maintaining quality even as it produces more enormous corporate, institutional, and civic buildings all over the world. The finesse of Foster’s modernism would seem a natural fit with Apple, which produces the best-designed consumer products of our time, and which has done more than any other company to inject sophisticated modern design into the mass market.
Foster has proposed a gargantuan glass-and-metal ring, four stories high, with a hole in the middle a third of a mile wide. The building, which will house upwards of twelve thousand employees, will have a circumference of a mile, and will be so huge that you won’t really be able to perceive its shape, except from the air. Like everything Foster does, it will be sleek and impeccably detailed, but who wants to work in a gigantic donut? Steve Jobs, speaking to the Cupertino City Council, likened the building to a spaceship. But buildings aren’t spaceships, any more than they are iPhones.
So why is Foster’s design troubling, maybe even a bit scary? The genius of the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, and other Apple products is that they are tools that function well and happen to be breathtakingly beautiful. (Last year, I wrote about the design for the new Apple store on the Upper West Side.) A building is also a tool, but of a very different sort. In architecture, scale—the size of various parts of a building in proportion to one another and to the size of human beings—counts for a lot. With this building, there seems to be very little sense of any connection to human size. Flexibility is a hallmark of the iPad, and it counts in architecture, too, but how much flexibility is there in a vast office governed entirely by geometry? For all of Foster’s sleekness, this Apple building seems more like a twenty-first-century version of the Pentagon.
Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, was one of the first to write about the new Apple building. He pointed out that, however elegant the headquarters might turn out to be, it will still be a huge suburban office complex, reinforcing car culture at a time when that seems increasingly less tenable. I suppose Apple has solved enough problems over the years that it may not be entirely fair to expect it to conquer suburban sprawl, too, but you would hope that a forward-thinking company would at least try not to compound the problem.
When Apple started opening retail stores, most of which have been designed by the firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, I thought they’d gotten it exactly right, and figured out how to translate the aesthetic brilliance of the company’s products into architecture. I still feel that way; their pristine glass box on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is the best Apple store yet. But that place is a tiny cottage compared to the proposed new headquarters.
When companies plan wildly ambitious, over-the-top headquarters, it is sometimes a sign of imperial hubris. A.T. & T. was broken up not too long after it moved into Johnson and Burgee’s famously grandiose “Chippendale skyscraper” on Madison Avenue. General Foods did not last too long after taking occupancy of the glass-and-metal palace Kevin Roche designed for it in Westchester County, and Union Carbide fell apart after it moved into another Roche building in Danbury, Connecticut. The New York Times Company’s stock price plummeted after it moved into its Renzo Piano building on Eighth Avenue, and they now lease the home they built for themselves.
Architecture isn’t in itself a cause of corporate decline—that notion is ridiculous—but overbearing buildings can sometimes be a symptom of companies losing touch with reality, and this problem will manifest itself in other ways. It’s said that Steve Jobs considers this building to be a key part of his legacy, which would be unfortunate, because it would mean that his last contribution to his company might well be his least meaningful.
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