Archinect - News

Perfectionists versus contractors: the details of building the Apple Campus

2017-02-09T13:45:00-05:00

One of the most vexing features was the doorways, which Apple wanted to be perfectly flat, with no threshold. The construction team pushed back, but Apple held firm. The rationale? If engineers had to adjust their gait while entering the building, they risked distraction from their work, according to a former construction manager. “We spent months trying not to do that because that’s time, money and stuff that’s never been done before,” the former construction manager said.

Although detail-obsessed architects can often find working with broad-strokes contractors to be challenging, there's one group of designers with perhaps even more rigorous attention to detail: the team at Apple. According to this article in Reuters, the actual building of the "spaceship" Apple Campus in Cupertino has been an unusually precise experience for those working in construction. According to the article, among many other requirements, "Apple's in-house construction team enforced many rules: No vents or pipes could be reflected in the glass. Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building ran to some 30 pages." Think perfect?

Why Steve Jobs Obsessed About Office Design (And, Yes, Bathroom Locations)

2014-10-08T19:50:00-04:00

When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard.

Steve Jobs’s Real Genius

2011-11-07T14:47:00-05:00

As his life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. “Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,” Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores.

“There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,” Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.” The architects wanted the windows to open. Jobs said no. He “had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. ‘That would just allow people to screw things up.’ ”