Even the Tyrell Pyramid engaged with its neighborhood better
Geoff Boeing: "Funny how renderings of the Apple Park campus always showed it in a gorgeous forest, when it's actually just plunked down in suburban sprawl."
Tags: corporations, doomed, sprawl
21 Responses:
See, that's the Apple Campus in 50 years after people disappear.
The few employees who will shuffle around inside won't have to put up with it for long. 4 year life span.
HR was concerned that after a few years, employees might develop their own emotional responses. You know--hate, love, fear, anger, envy (cough--collective bargaining). So they built in a failsafe device...
Off topic, but your illustrated "Previously" sidebar is awesome. Is it a WordPress plugin?
Thanks! It's a WordPress widget that I wrote, but I haven't published it. It makes assumptions about how things are done here.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the layout. It looks pretty good when the window is really wide, and the sidebar has gone to two columns. But when things are narrow and/or short, and it decides to push itself down to the bottom instead of the side, I think it looks kind of wonky.
It's pretty neato.
I was wondering about that. Also it makes the layout decision based on aspect ratio and not pixel count, which is good I guess, but it means that my huge desktop screen doesn't get it because I only use 2/3rds of the width for the browser window.
Sorta. The "two column sidebar" decision is just a media query based on width of the window. The "previously at side or bottom" is based on whether the content area or the sidebar is taller.
Let's see if Apple can avoid the little-heeded curse of the new HQ.
The proverbial Edifice Complex.
It's still a construction site, isn't it? There's no way that a company as image-obsessed as Apple (see the door handle thing, among others) is going to leave the lot in its current state.
There is no perspective from which that foresty render can be true unless miles of Cupertino is leveled. Not that I'm against that.
The scale of the building may be leading you astray. (Or the scale of the building in the forested artist conception.)
Going by the scale on Google Maps, the ring itself is 200' thick. There's approximately 200 feet between the building and the nearest adjacent streets, which is enough room for mature trees several rows deep.
If by "the scale of the building in the artist conception" what you're saying is, "The artist's rendering is a complete lie" then I agree!
As density rises further, Apple Park will rise on jacks to meet the height of the arcology park level.
The corporate buildings that were in the area were nothing to write home about but they were old enough that what tree landscaping they had were fairly mature. I'm sure Apple would explain the lot scraping as starting with a "clean palette".
Apple has a tree guy. He picked trees from the lot to save (moved somewhere during construction, presumably). And will be moving several thousand more trees to the property from all over. The goal is 9,000 trees. Not necessarily small saplings, pretty large trees can be moved these days.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-parks-tree-whisperer/
"But when Muffly began his work, he realized that nearly all the (non-indigenous) existing trees would have to go.
“It was all junk trees and parking lots here,” he says. “So it was a long process. Over the next year or so. I surveyed the trees and picked out about a hundred of them that I felt were worth moving. And we had to stretch to get a hundred out of the [roughly 4,000] existing trees.”
Apparently what was there was pretty much typical office park landscaping. At some point before that the area was orchards. So it's been a long time since there were old-growth trees there.
A chancre in the anus of the taint of the Bay Area.
Seems about right.
It’s peobably a Hellmouth.
Ispano Guymelf Service middle-man wannabes, that's what it looks like. Why would it not also be set in the world of Beara Keatley Snyder and be the source of water plentitude? Why buildings near it will be styled as glass bath toys to bathe in its aqueous dishwasheritude.
The periodic areas for monks will permit the column of water to stand in place when not required, solipsist virtue permitting. So what if it tops out at 400" instead of 400M? You see, it already doesn't matter!
This design is the maximal aesthetic evolution of the USG's Pentagon office block, seems to be more efficient and pleasant than the Cisco and Broadcom campi I've been to/through. Low bars, I know.
Ideally Apple would have bought Lanai and made the entire island its new campus, or even better just constructed its campus on a new island south of the Dumbarton bridge, Mega-Tokyo style.
But Borland's campus is/was Best Campus.