Getting to core of Apple’s design influence
The immense and perfectly round headquarters that Apple seeks to build in Cupertino is (a) “an alien mothership hanging gently in the middle of Arcadia,” (b) “a mere update of a PRE-WWII concept,” or (c) “emblematic of the new American dream”?
The correct answer is all of the above and a whole lot more and less, including the inspiration for the best recent volume I’ve seen on the intersection of design and culture in today’s America.
The publication in question is the second issue of Clog, a quarterly that bills itself as an antidote to the multiplatform opinionating that passes for current architectural discourse (or discourse of any sort, more’s the pity). Each issue homes in on a single topic, in this case Apple’s impact on product design, architecture and the public realm we all inhabit.
The hook is the Apple campus-to-be that Steve Jobs unveiled in July in his final public appearance — though “campus” hardly conveys the sci-fi grandeur of a gleaming ring of metal and glass big enough to hold at least 12,000 workers amid a 130-acre landscape that would include groves of fruit
trees, perhaps to conjure up the South Bay before Silicon Valley.
I’m intrigued: Detached mega-structures aren’t my idea of utopia, but the shimmering purity has a one-off appeal. That puts me in the minority among architecture critics, most of whom decried what Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times called a “retrograde cocoon.”
You’ll find echoes of this disdain in the 55 perspectives found within the all-white covers (naturally) of Clog #2. But it rings hollow amid the larger picture that emerges, or at least the one that I discerned: This is a company that has made its mark by pursuing perfection on its own terms and, in the process, redefining for its followers what “perfection” can be.
We’re shown the ranch house where Apple was born in 1976, and postage-stamp-size photographs of all 360 Apple stores doing business as of December 2011. There’s an analysis of the company’s impact on glass technology — considerable — and a study of Apple No. 339 on Fourth Street in Berkeley that shows, among other things, how “window panes were manufactured to a width that aligns with the floor lines and the exterior sidewalk panes.”
The headquarters concept itself is introduced in the most egalitarian manner possible. Six pages of images and plans — you be the judge.
Then the judging begins: fragmented views of a unitary vision conceived at Jobs’ behest by Norman Foster, an architect who has always pursued a technological sheen beyond what most clients or budgets would allow.
“A wedding ring to consummate Apple’s marriage with corporatism,” sniffs Joshua Prince-ramus, onetime protege to Rem Koolhaas and among the architectural elite approached by Clog for reactions. But the journal follows with dayafter responses to the unveiling on the Macrumors website, such as kiljoy616’s gushingly ungrammatical “I am drooling just looking at it Donut. Serious that is beautiful.”
An essay by UC Berkeley Professor Louise Mozingo places Apple’s Eden within the history of migration of corporations to the suburbs, infused with her dismay at the firm’s “commitment to verdant, entitled isolation in a world of diminishing resources and fractioning social divides.”
Followed by? A broadside from Michael Kubo, director of Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston: “The anachronism which critics have imputed to the buildings is actually their own, revealed in their repetition of a traditional understanding of the city and its limits which no longer applies.”
What I like about the curated cacophony is that the voices don’t cancel each other out. We’re immersed in today’s complexity of expectations — and the expectation of simplistic response. Snark, satire, adulation embrace or scorn; choose your position, but choose it fast.
By distilling this into 150 pages, Clog reaffirms the old-fashioned value of sorting through information, thinking things out. It also, implicitly, demonstrates that architecture and design can never be looked at merely as fields of art. They’re the physical essence of the world in which we live — as Apple has shown for better and worse.