PLEASE let us build Fruit Loop Central, Apple begs Cupertino City Apple has launched a last-minute charm offensive in Cupertino ahead of a council vote which will decide whether it can build a super-massive “fruit loop” headquarters in the city. Residents still have one last chance to make a public complaint tomorrow at a meeting of the City Council of Cupertino, California, the global home …
That's an impressive building, and if it winds up looking anything like the mocks up would be an asset to the area. Shame about the R&D "huts" flung to the side and the massive double story carparks for the lesser staff 1/3 of a mile away, but at least the car parks aren't 2 square miles of asphalt.
As for the town, the impact of having a company such as Apple head quartered there is massive, there will always be a huge amount of pressure from the area's largest employer (by far), such that pretty much anything they want they get. The danger, like the mining industries in the UK (and other countries), that dominated areas to the extent they built whole towns for their workers, is what happens to the area when it goes wrong?
There is a difference between the two.
Most of the plasticky supermarkets and rubbish new mass-produced apartment / office buildings being put up in crowded Blighty are completely out of scale their surroundings and blight communities with their ugliness. Whereas this is looks like top quality stuff being proposed for a run-down lot in an office/light industrial zone in a small town which is the home town of one of the biggest companies in the world. So normally I couldn't see what anyone would have to complain about it.
However, since The Register requires a complaint, here you are:
The design is over-simplistic and a negation of intellectual architecture, being designed to appeal to the ignorant masses. The inclusion of trees is a clear attempt to pander to outdated populist mores that are out of step with the modern architectural canon. The lack of sharp angles and deterministic cantilevering shows a distinct lack of imagination which condemns this as an outrage to anyone with a cultured sense of intellectual aesthetics. It is, put simply, an abomination, a blot on the purity of the architectural profession.
It's Tesco who build right in the MIDDLE of town; not Asda.
I wouldn't mind so much had the big three chains not beaten to death in-town supermarkets a decade ago by crushing them on prices. Yet I note that Tescos Metro gleefully sells the more expensive items for the same price as the 'uncompetitive' supermarkets that they drove out of business with superstores.
Really sir?
May I invite you to visit Motherwell, North Lanarkshire?
Huge, poorly designed and hideous ASDA monstrosity built across the road from the main shopping precinct. It has taken almost 5 years for the shopping precinct to recover after ASDA vacated the main area to move across the road.
I don't object to supermarkets, just piss ugly design.
>The design is over-simplistic and a negation of intellectual architecture, being designed to appeal to the ignorant masses.
Not bad. But you forgot to say that it brings the outside into the interior, and that it pragmatically eschews functionalist polemics in a bid to question and negate lingering anti-visualist hermeneutic biases.
Also, it looks like a doughnut, which is a bit silly.
...shame about the exclusion zone.
These mega campuses are the antithesis of an interesting city. In a real city, the general population can walk around and enjoy the architecture (or not as the case may be), and you get a mix of offices, restaurants, cafes, hotels, apartments etc.
When your city is nothing more than a few exclusion zones housing a handful of corporate megacompanies, your city turns into a load of ghettos which you can't enter, and travelling through your city becomes a 'get in the car and drive a long way around'.
Apple is not the first to do this. The existing site was the same thing. The city planners are to blame for allowing the street grid to be absorbed and set off-limits. The same thing goes on in London, with the desire for ever larger building plots which cause us all to have to 'go around'. At least in London, lots of developments are prevented from doing this, but the US has been at it for decades.
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Apple learned that the sun shineth not from the ass of Apple but from the ass of Jobs and were much vexed..
...and the most prescient of them foresaw working from a lockup in Luton within five years and did jump off high buildings accordingly.
...lo, there was much fanboi wailing & gnashing of teeth, while in the real world life went on as normal and no person even registered the beginning of the Applopalypse..
Let 'em build it,then get GCHQ to slap a trademark\copyright\patent thingy on em..
The prior art being that our world class leading secretive organisation did a doughnut shaped world headquarters first.. 'to generate a great working environment and protect our investment in IP'
Just a thought..
If the numbers are comparable to the 12,000 Apple will have in this new building, any traffic issues wouldn't be worse than they were back when HP filled their buildings.
Actually traffic would probably be better than it used to be, since Apple and other high tech Silicon Valley companies have done more to encourage use of mass transit, car pooling, biking to work etc. lately than was typical back when HP was housed here.
On the other hand, if there used to be only 6,000 there, then I could see where there might be some worries about traffic.
I lived in Belgium for a while and I remember IBM building their headquarters just a little outside the village I was in. One of the primary requirements placed upon them: no installation (buildings, etc.) could be seen from public roads. IBM built dirt-banks, levies and planted trees and shrubbery all around their campus. Apart from the company sign at the entrance of the campus driveway, you could drive by the place without knowing it was there.
They've moved to Brussels since then, but still...
They did the same down here in upside down expatland. Their huge complex in Coonara Avenue, Sydney is in the middle of some of the finest new bushland you ever saw. Even on campus, you only see one building at a time, the rest hidden by man made valleys and hills.
From the road, the entrance is a single IBM sign in sympathetic brown, framed by a couple of trees and that's it - not even a roofline visible from the street.
Of course, Baulkham Hills council spends its entire annual road maintenance budget on resurfacing and painting the road outside IBM, but potholes are a small price to pay for such an invisible building.
"Apple's claims that their new headquarters will be the greenest building since Noah's Ark"
Comparing your building design to a mythical 'boat' is not the best analogy.
And what was so green about the Noah myth?
And if it where even true, he'd have to shovel all that poop out that single little window.
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