Archinect - News

Issey Miyake, the feted 'architect' of high fashion, has passed away in Tokyo aged 84

2022-08-09T21:10:00-04:00

A remarkable intellectual titan of contemporary fashion and high culture has passed away as multiple outlets are reporting the death of iconic Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake on Friday, August 5th after a battle with cancer.

A pioneer of the pleat and use of technologically-driven design, Miyake became a symbol of radical interventions in fashion. He was championed by photographer Irving Penn, Artforum, and many other art world mainstays who formed his early client base, which would later famously include Apple founder Steve Jobs.

In an industry ruled by form, proportion, and silhouette, Miyake used a complex understanding of architectural concepts to design garments that were sculptural in structure and unrepeatable in their unique ability to convey movement and the fluid body. Noted as the first Asian designer to "storm Paris runways in the '70s," his work continues to transcend contemporary fashion. His research-based Pleats Please and later Homme Plissé Issey Miyake lin...

The creative power of walking

2019-10-08T08:00:00-04:00

Sitting there, program in hand, concept underway, and with constraints to abide by, we consider the possibilities. The design process isn't a scientific thing, there's an artistic aspect to it, one that sometimes leaves us searching for the perfect solution. We arrive at something, but know when it isn't right, it could be better, we think. But, how do we get there? We sketch, we model, we converse, we charrette, and yet sometimes there are still those moments of creative contemplation where we can't put our finger on that thing that we know lies in the back of our minds. Historically, walking has been one way to bring that thing to the forefront of our creative pursuit.

The School of Athens by Raphael.

Mobile pondering

In 335 BCE, after his pupil, Alexander the Great, rose to power and conquered Athens, Aristotle began teaching at the Lyceum, a school of philosophy whose followers would later become known as the Peripatetics. In the famous fresco The School of Athens, Italian Renai...

Inside Foster + Partners newly remodeled Fifth Avenue Apple Store

2019-09-26T13:38:00-04:00

"Now nearly double the size of its original version with a higher ceiling and more natural light, Apple Fifth Avenue is a brighter, more expansive space, and the perfect stage for customers to discover and try Apple’s newest products...It remains the only Apple retail location open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Apple reported in a recent press release.

The design was led by Foster + Partners in collaboration with Jony Ive. The team has introduced a number of new features and changes to the underground retail space. Known by it's iconic glass cube and suspended Apple logo, the newly renovated store sports a new stainless steel spiral staircase, 62 skylights that connect the underground space to the city above, a new area for classes, and of course, extended space to display the newest products.

Image courtesy of Foster + Partners

Additionally, the team chose to dig further into the base of the space to provide higher ceilings, creating a more expansive environment for visitors. Na...

New images of Apple Park Visitor Center as it opens to the public

2017-11-27T14:44:00-05:00

Over a decade in the making, Apple's newly completed campus finally welcomed the general public on November 17th with the grand opening celebration of the Apple Park Visitor Center. There, customers can sip on coffee and snacks; purchase a range of Apple products and accessories, including Apple Park-exclusive T-shirts, hats, postcards, baby onesies, playing cards, and tote bags; and gawk at a 3D model of the campus that provides guests with information through an augmented reality experience.

Apple Campus. © Nigel Young/Foster+Partners

Designed by the company's de facto architectural firm in residence, Foster + Partners, the structure's main feature is a cantilevered carbon fiber roof designed to float. Sound familiar? Along with the staircases, stone walls, terrazzo floors and glass façade a bird would easily fly into, the design is very much alike their also freshly completed flagship store in Chicago, and features similar elements as the...

New photos of the 'floating' carbon fiber roof Foster + Partners designed for Apple

2017-10-03T15:27:00-04:00

While most of Apple's new Cupertino campus is still under construction, a small crown jewel, the Foster + Partners-designed Steve Jobs Theater, already attracted the world's attention when it hosted the unveiling of the latest iPhone models last month.

Now we've received new, fascinating photographs that show how both firms — architect and client — applied their trademark obsession with details to a building that was especially close to the late namesake's heart.

The building's most striking feature — the record-breaking, disc-like
roof that appears floating in mid air — is not only an engineering feat
but also a damn thing of beauty: weighing 80.7 tons and spanning 155 feet, it is the world's largest carbon fiber roof and also takes the podium for all-glass-supported structure.

Here are some more details about the Steve Jobs Theater project we've received from F+P:

Carbon fiber roof:

The Theater lobby roof is the largest self-supporting fully carbon fiber roof in the world.
The ro...

Christopher Hawthorne: Apple and Amazon's architectural visions "owe nothing to the American city"

2017-09-14T17:58:00-04:00

It has also been remarkable to watch Amazon pursue a dramatically different strategy. Its plans for a second headquarters suggest that in terms of architecture and campus planning it wants to be everything Apple is not. It wants to lean into the city — and thorny questions about gentrification and housing prices, to the extent that they will be a natural byproduct of this process — rather than away from it.

"Though he took a very different path to get there," Hawthorne writes in his LAT opinion piece analyzing Apple & Amazon's lofty headquarters ambitions with a focus on urban integration (or the complete lack thereof), "Bezos ultimately reached the same conclusion Jobs did: that the wealthiest and most powerful tech companies owe nothing to the American city."

Apple Campus will open its doors to the public next week for iPhone 8 launch

2017-09-05T15:41:00-04:00

While the new Apple Campus still remains incomplete, Apple is moving forward with hosting the launch of their new iPhone 8 on site. The company sent out a media invite last Thursday with the tagline, "Let's meet at our place," confirming the location of the event. It will be the first time Apple has allowed large numbers of outsiders to visit the campus.

Main campus, still incomplete. YouTube/Duncan Sinfield

The reveal coincides with the 10th anniversary of the first iPhone, launched in 2007. Rumored features include a 3D camera that can unlock the device using facial recognition, no more home button, wireless charging, OLED display technology with greater power efficiency, improved dual-lens camera, and an almost $1,000 price tag.

Steve Jobs Theater. YouTube/Duncan Sinfield

The keynote speeches will be held at the Steve Jobs Theater, an 1,000 seat below ground auditorium that sits on top of the hill overlooking the main building. Visitors enter through a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder ...

Wired gets up close and personal with Apple's new Foster-designed campus

2017-05-19T18:01:00-04:00

As with any Apple product, its shape would be determined by its function. This would be a workplace where people were open to each other and open to nature, and the key to that would be modular sections, known as pods, for work or collaboration.

Since 2009, Foster and Partners have been working on a new headquarters for the tech giant Apple, originally in close collaboration with Steve Jobs, its founder, who saw it as one of his last crucial contribution to his legacy. Even though dramatic photographs of the ring-shaped structure have been flooding the Internet for some time now, there hasn’t really been any deep dives into the mega-project—until now.

Writing for Wired, Steven Levy weaves together long-awaited details about its appearance with issues of architectural representation and the brand identity of Apple, which the “spaceship” is intended to embody.

“Inside the 755-foot tunnel, the white tiles along the wall gleam like a recently installed high-end bathroom; it's what the Lincoln Tunnel must have looked like the day it opened, before the first smudge of soot sullied its walls. And as we emerge into the light, the Ring comes into view. As the Jeep orbits it, the sun glistens off the building's curved glass surface. Th...

Is Apple's campus design about making the corporation your entire life?

2016-04-14T13:04:00-04:00

When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, and Apple will pat itself on the back for yet another example of "innovation." ...But few are aware that Apple’s monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.

This fascinating article delves into the soul-sucking thinking behind isolated corporate behemoth design, which essentially captures the employee for the entire day and encourages a detached, "Who cares; I've got mine!" thinking towards maintaining urban infrastructure. Consider this:

Connecticut General’s new corporate estate included snack bars, ping-pong tables, shuffleboards, bowling alleys, tennis courts, horseshoe pits, a barbershop, beauty parlor, game room, media library, meditation room, and gas station, as well as offsite services like dry-cleaning, shoe repair, flowers, and grocery delivery—more than half a century before Google and Facebook added such benefits. "All these perks had a certain element of welfare capitalism," Mozingo says, "this idea that the all-inclusive physical environment is going to foster certain kinds of behavior, which are profitable for the company."

This thinking extended into the employee's need for a car:

Even the shift to personal vehicles rathe...

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.

Apple patents Shanghai Apple Store's glass cylinder entryway; Steve Jobs co-credited as inventor

2013-10-01T13:36:00-04:00

Like the flagship Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York, the Shanghai cylinder is made almost entirely out of huge monolithic glass slabs, with only connecting joints fashioned out of metal. The Chinese build is more complex, however, as the specifications required the glass pieces required be curved to form arcs. These panels were then joined to create a circle and ultimately a cylinder.

Steve Jobs, Architect?

2013-03-18T19:24:00-04:00

Yet another treatise on Steve Jobs? As an “architect” — really? And with Apple seemingly waning, aren't we behind the curve on this? Suffice it to say that my interest is not solely in Jobs himself, but rather in the challenge he poses to the methods and purpose of an architectural historian.... But since architectural stories are surprising rare here on the edge of the continent, I need a shtick; no matter my connoisseur-ish personal tastes and leftist political dispositions.

What is revealed when we contemplate the late Steve Jobs not only as a technologist extraordinaire but also as a sort of architect? And if we then compare Jobs with another complicated virtuoso, Rem Koolhaas? On Places, architectural historian Simon Sadler argues "Jobs and Koolhaas both seem to have been driven by the possibility that they can act inside, or around, a postmodern world resistant to purpose. Both share an attraction toward design as a type of hermeneutics — a will to learn about the world through the attempt to change it."

Rich X Rich

2012-10-30T00:09:00-04:00

Double happiness by Zaha Hadid and Philippe Starck .

A house for Russian billionaire and his gf Naomi Campbell. And a Steve Job design directed yacht called Venus.

Architects + Architecture + the power of money.

"Taking over the galaxy? Naomi Campbell's Russian billionaire boyfriend builds her a house that looks like a spaceship by Zaha Hadid, who specializes in ecostyle buildings and was also the brains behind famous buildings including the opera house in Guangzhou and the Olympics Aquatics Center in London." The Mail

“I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat. But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.” Mashable

Gov. Brown gives fast-track status to Apple headquarters

2012-07-03T17:26:00-04:00

"Apple's state-of-the art campus brings at least $100 million dollars in investment to California and generates no additional greenhouse gas emissions," Brown said in a statement to this newspaper, listing two of the requirements Apple had met to qualify under the law. "On-site fuel cells and 650,000 square feet of solar panels will provide clean, renewable energy for more than 12,000 Apple employees on the new campus."

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.’ ”

Did Steve Jobs’ modernist childhood home by Eichler incubate his design vision?

2011-11-01T14:05:22-04:00

It turns out that Job’s masterful use of modern design could have been incubated by growing up in a home which was built by the father of the California modernist movement, Joseph Eichler. The idea is not too far fetched - in Walter Issicason's biography on the design pioneer, Jobs admits "that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market".

From Inhabitat

Steve Jobs, a Genius of Store Design, Too

2011-10-25T19:27:00-04:00

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”

Oh, look, Bohlin Cywinski is hiring.

From glass stairways to great market halls

2011-10-16T23:44:00-04:00

This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”

The Sunday NYT Business section published A Genius of the Storefront, Too, a piece which explores a collaboration, that extended from Pixar’s headquarters completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, between Peter Bohlin and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — and Mr. Jobs himself. James B Stewart argues in the process, that the idiosyncratic design aesthetic(s) for which Steve Jobs was known professionally, "left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession."

Norman Foster's Tribute to Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T14:50:35-04:00

He was the ultimate perfectionist and demanded of himself as he demanded of others. We are better as individuals and certainly wiser as architects through the experience of the last two years and more of working for him. His participation was so intense and creative that our memory will be that of working with one of the truly great designers and mentors.

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T19:59:00-04:00

The world is a little less interesting now.

Apple's new headquarters lacks vision

2011-09-13T12:24:40-04:00

Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam — Jobs told the council "it's a little like a spaceship landed" — in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and '70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.

Check this previous article for more information, images and comments from the community: Plans for new Apple HQ, by Norman Foster, officially released

Is Steve Jobs the Model for a Revived Economy?

2011-08-30T18:22:19-04:00

Steve Jobs has the right name for what's missing in America's economy. Does he also represent the way back to prosperity? We look at his record at Apple and its influence in the US and around the world.

KCRW's "To the Point" addresses Steve Jobs' attention to innovation and integration of design into Apple's business model, and how that can improve the state of today's horrible job market.

Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO

2011-08-24T19:26:36-04:00

Apple Inc.'s ailing chief executive Steve Jobs is officially stepping down from the helm of the company, an historic shift that hands the reins to chief operating officer Tim Cook. The company said Mr. Jobs submitted his resignation to the board of directors on Wednesday and "strongly recommended" that the board name Mr. Cook as his successor.

We hate to see you leave, Steve.

Steve goes to the mayor (again)

2011-06-09T17:50:50-04:00

Maybe they just couldn’t come up with any questions. So here are a few: Can you confirm that the architect of the building is Norman Foster, like everyone’s reporting? Is Apple going to make the grounds open to the public so they can enjoy the fifty billion trees that he’ll be planting? Will there be any kind of programming in the new auditorium that can expose the next generation to careers in technology and science? Could you share your awesome private transit system with the public?

Alissa Walker, aka Gelatobaby, has penned a great piece in response to the highly circulated presentation of Apple's new headquarters to the Cupertino city council.

Also, our friends at OpenBuildings have posted a hilarious mashup of the event to YouTube.

Steve Jobs Proposes Spaceship-Shaped Cupertino Campus

2011-06-08T13:06:51-04:00

[Apple] has staff scattered in rented buildings throughout the city. The plan for the future campus puts 12,000 to 13,000 employees inside a single four-story oval building. Jobs made a convincing case for what he calls "a shot at building the best office building in the world." By moving parking underground, 80% of the 150-acre property will be landscaped. Apple has hired the lead arborist from Stanford to fill it with 6,000 trees, and the company will build its own energy center power source.

We assume this design is by Norman Foster, judging from the design and rendering style, but we don't have confirmation.

How Apple works: Inside the world's biggest startup

2011-05-09T18:39:21-04:00

From Steve Jobs down to the janitor: How America's most successful -- and most secretive -- big company really operates.