Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
"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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — Los Angeles Times
"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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — Steven Levy for WIRED
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... View full entry
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. — Fast Company Design
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... View full entry
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. — Walter Isaacson, Linkedin.com
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. — appleinsider.com
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. — Places Journal
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
"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." — siliconvalley.com
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. — newyorker.com
“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... View full entry
