The
sheer magnitude of Apple’s new headquarters sets it apart from any
other technology workspace on the West Coast. Instead of many buildings
spread across a campus, the site features one master circular structure
(2.8 million square feet) called the Ring, designed to house 12,000
employees. (To get a
sense of its scale,
the Ring’s internal courtyard is wider than St. Peter’s Square in Rome.
Its external wall would surround the Pentagon.) The four-story glass
building designed by Norman Foster seamlessly integrates a long and
diverse list of technical achievements — from the enormous solar panel
array on the roof to hidden cable management mechanisms at the
workstations — all according to Jobs’s uncompromising design standards.
Yet
one of Jobs’s most significant directives was that 80% of the nearly
200-acre site would be devoted to parkland. In fact, blurring the
boundary between architecture and nature became the defining idea for
the project. Old concrete parking lots gave way to new green landscapes
and a wooded preserve populated with 9,000 indigenous California trees,
including ornamental and fruit trees, selected to resist drought and the
threat of future climate change.
While
many have awaited the opening of Apple Park with great anticipation, a
project of this scope and ambition inevitably isn’t without its critics.
In that same Wired piece:
…what
began with aesthetic judgments of the digital renderings—the Los
Angeles Times’ architecture critic called the Ring a “retrograde
cocoon”—has lately turned to social and cultural critiques. That the
campus is a snobby isolated preserve, at odds with the trendy urbanist
school of corporate headquarters. (Amazon, Twitter, and Airbnb are all
part of a movement that hopes to integrate tech employees into cities as
opposed to having them commute via fuel-gobbling cars or numbing
Wi-Fi-equipped buses.) That the layout of the Ring is too rigid, and
that unlike Google’s planned Mountain View headquarters (which that
company has described as having “lightweight blocklike structures, which
can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas”), Apple
Park is not prepared to adapt to potential changes in how, where, and
why people work. That there is no childcare center.
Certainly
some of those critiques may prove to be warranted, and others raise
valid points. Overall, it’s probably fair to say that a project of this
complexity and scale can only be truly evaluated post-occupancy and over
time.
As
someone who studies the design of high-tech workspaces, I am drawn to
ask a more fundamental question: Why is Apple heading in such a
different direction than most of its Valley peers? In other words, what
is this project really about?
The answer starts, as in all things Apple, with Steve Jobs.
How We Got Here
To
set this in context, it’s important to first understand the fundamental
challenge of building contemporary (and future) workspaces, especially
for technology companies: Software and buildings operate on entirely
different timescales. Software, like information technology in general,
is optimized for speed and upgrades — constant, sometimes radical
change. Buildings, on the other hand, are change averse, optimized to
stand for decades. But despite the different timescale, the challenge
for real estate executives is not unlike the one facing CIOs: to make
sure a new investment will not quickly become obsolete.
Silicon
Valley has dealt with this challenge for decades, but the unique
culture of the region gives its companies a competitive advantage.
Throughout the 20th century, the Valley’s ascent can be traced to close
geographical proximity and deep collaboration between tech companies,
academia, and government agencies — a formula that produced some of the
most significant technology ventures in modern American history.
Influenced
by this collaborative context, Valley founders prized proximity to one
another; face-to-face interactions; informal deal making; and
changeable, impermanent team and org structures. These values are
reflected in their buildings, which adopted design strategies to make
workspace configurations adaptable, or somewhat less permanent. The aim
was to get the physical workspace to perform at the speed of software —
or at least get a little closer to it.
This
led to open floor plans, rich amenities and services, informal attire, a
collegial atmosphere, and very distinct work cultures. The more
successful interior spaces foster “collisions” and spontaneous
interactions among employees through a variety of space typologies.
Those collisions,
as research (mine and others’) shows, increase learning, collaboration, and ultimately innovation.
In
the last decade, however, the timescale gap between workspaces,
buildings, and technology has widened even more rapidly, as mobile
phones, social media, and other new technology have allowed companies to
quickly reach massive scale. New young tech companies — Airbnb,
Twitter, Instagram, Snap, and WeWork, among others — operate differently
than Silicon Valley giants. They acquire huge customer bases and
receive staggering market valuations while employing a relatively small
number of people. Their business models are fluid. Their speed and
disruptive scale inevitably force them to choose workspaces that
emphasize extreme flexibility, impermanence, and the ability to be
reconfigured to accommodate rapid growth.
For
this new tech workforce, work is less a “place” built through
furniture, and more a digital collaboration space built by networks.
Having grown up communicating and working through mobile devices and
social networks, younger workers and founders see themselves and their
work as “mobile” by default. Not surprisingly, this shapes their
expectations of a workspace.
The
model emerging to support them is a network of corporate offices
distributed among the commercial shops and public spaces of a
neighborhood community. Workers move freely through these different
spatial contexts, bumping into colleagues, collaborators, potential
partners, and other urbanites. Work happens anywhere and anytime within
this urban fabric. It mirrors the nature of online interactions, where
personal, social, and professional lives interconnect naturally at all
hours.
These
responses to the rapid change of technology seem reasonable when one
thinks about how most companies measure their real estate investments.
Mostly, the focus is on efficiency: cost and profitability per square
foot, vacancy rates, maintenance overhead.
When
it comes to Apple Park, however, the metrics used to measure the
reported $5 billion investment appear more complex and nuanced. They
belong to an entirely different domain, and perhaps a different category
of buildings altogether.
Enduring Value Beyond Efficiency
He
probably knew the Churchillian adage that we shape our buildings, and
then they shape us. In fact, his raw instinct for manipulating space to
influence behavior was well known since the days of designing the Pixar
campus in 1998.
A
decade later, the design concept for Apple Park expanded his approach
and legendary attention to (some say obsession with) functional detail
to a higher level of sophistication. Today the almost finished project
conveys Jobs’s aspirations through significant breakthroughs in the
building systems of our time:
Innovation in exterior building systems.
The ring is a curved glass faƧade. Not a single flat sheet of exterior
glass was used, and the company made a manufacturing modification so
that the hue of the glass would not be green. The main cafƩ is fronted
by the single largest sheet of curved glass in the world. This design
maximizes the connection between the worker and nature just outside the
windows.
Innovation in structural systems.
To achieve the curvature of a perfect circle while minimizing landfill
use, the project developed its own concrete plant. Ninety-five
percent of all the concrete from the old HP campus — buildings, parking
lots, sidewalks — was ground and recycled on-site to build the concrete
frame of the new building.
Innovation in mechanical and electrical systems.
The building counts one of the largest solar panel arrays in the world,
with the aim of powering the entire campus with electricity generated
on-site. The mechanical air conditioning system is designed to make this
the largest naturally ventilated building in the world. A former
director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency leads the project’s
environmental aspects.
Innovation in workplace systems.
Not an open plan. The overall strategy for the workspace is based on
modular “pods” dedicated to either teamwork, focused work, or
socialization. The rhythm of the pods “permits serendipitous and fluid
meeting spaces” along the circumference of the Ring, connecting interior
high-tech environments for productivity to panoramic views of the
exterior landscape, orchards, and sunlight.
It’s
not just these large-scale design moves that convey the building’s
aspirations. Doorknobs, glass doors, desks, even faucets are formed to
fit and contribute to the overall experience of the space. No detail
rushed, no off-the-shelf solution used. Every touchpoint seems to
present an opportunity for timeless design. Arguably, like in an iPhone.
Or, in the world of buildings, a cathedral.
Apple
Park may actually have more in common with that category of
architectural project than with other corporate workspace ventures.
Cathedrals carry symbolic value, aspirational visions that go far beyond
their function. In fact, the very great ones in Europe required
significant innovations in the architectural technology of their time in
order to achieve their vision — think Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence,
the flying buttresses in Chartres, the vaulted roof in the Duomo of
Milan. As with those types of buildings, technology breakthroughs were
necessary for Apple Park’s vision to exist; extraordinary details and
craftsmanship were necessary for it to inspire.
Closer
to home, a more practical analogue is this. In the world of technology
workspaces, we haven’t seen this sense of timelessness and the
deliberate intent to build far into the future in over half a century,
when the same long-view ethos produced the Sandia National Laboratories,
NASA Johnson Space Center, Fermilab, or the Manhattan Project. These
20th-century projects were symbols that inspired many generations of
workers to see their work as part of something bigger, to employ their
talents in advancing new frontiers of science and technology innovation
for all.
Beyond
its function as a workspace, Apple Park may ultimately aspire to a
21st-century version of this ethos. This project is about a legacy,
timeless design, and the belief that the design of a headquarters can
shape a company’s trajectory and inspire generations of future workers
and leaders for years to come.
Contrarian and Obsolete?
To many critics, Jobs’s vision doesn’t make a lot of sense. From the Wired article:
“It’s
an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the
future,” says Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley.
“It’s
a spectacular piece of formal design, but it’s contrarian to what’s
going on in corporate headquarters across the tech industry,” says Scott
Wyatt, an architect at NBBJ, a prominent international firm that has
designed buildings for Google, Amazon, and Tencent.
There’s
no doubt that Apple Park stands in stark contrast to the flexibility
and speed of successful contemporary workspaces for Silicon Valley and
the tech startup set. But it seems inaccurate to state that Jobs’s
vision wasn’t taking the future into account.
At
a time when the future of work itself demands closer contact with
machines, Apple Park deliberately sets human workers in closer contact
with nature. Jobs’s vision wasn’t concerned with whether future
employees will rely on AI interfaces, telepresence robots for
collaboration, or augmented reality for prototyping. He envisioned an
enduring building that would be relevant 100 years from now, like a
cathedral or national lab.
Most
technology companies want to build workspaces that can adapt over time.
Understandably, they want to hedge against unpredictability and rapid
change. Apple instead is building a campus that aims to inspire and
stand the test of time. It is not a hedge. Little that Steve Jobs did
was.
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