When Steve Jobs laid out plans for Apple’s new corporate campus to the Cupertino City Council on Tuesday, he noted that the giant circular building looks a bit like a spaceship.
We’ll have to give him that one. But does Apple really, as Jobs said during his presentation, have “a shot at building the best office building in the world?”
The architects we talked with did seem impressed:
“On the surface it does seem like a dream of forward-thinking product design and an environmental Eden,” said Sean Gallivan, a senior designer at HOK in San Francisco.
“I thought it was a wonderful sustainable improvement to what was there already,” said Carl Roehling, President and CEO of SmithGroup.
But neither anointed the building “the best” at first glance. Roehling raised questions about how the perfectly circular building could be adapted and added to as it ages. “Apple is a wonderfully creative company in industrial design that continues to morph their own product — before they’re done with iPad 1 they bring out iPad 2. How does this building reflect that same ethic?” he asked.
Gallivan wanted to know more about how it would handle energy and carbon questions, how it would act as both building and campus, and how it would support Apple’s culture of innovation and creativity.“The new Apple campus, with its woven system of supports tied together in a circular foundation and its cambered surface of glass, evokes the structure and geometry of a wreath. Wreaths by their very nature are symbols of welcome or closure,” wrote HOK Director of Design Paul Woolford. “Time will tell us which wreath we’re being presented.”
Any way you slice it, the company’s plans for its new “AppleSaucer” (our term, not Apple’s) are certainly unique. But it’s not the first corporate headquarters with futuristic space flair. Here are four corporate spaceships that have already landed.
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Some say this building resembles a stack of records, but we think it could pass as a spaceship, too.Image Courtesy of Flickr, DennisSylvesterHurd
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