At Apple, One Ring to Bind Them All -- WSJ
May 15 2017 - 3:02AM
Dow Jones News
Booming technology titans build glitzy architectural marvels to
project power
By Tripp Mickle and Eliot Brown
Apple Inc. employees last month began testing the company's
latest innovation: Apple Park, one of history's most expensive
corporate campuses and the leading example of the tech industry's
newfound love for splashy architecture.
The first of 12,000 Apple headquarters employees moved from
several drab, stone buildings in Cupertino, Calif., to space across
town in the 2.8-million-square-foot circular building that
resembles a spaceship. It features a seamless, curved-glass
exterior and a theater that architects said was designed to look
like a MacBook Air. The estimated $5 billion project commanded
years of attention from top Apple executives including Chief Design
Officer Jony Ive, according to three of the more than 100
architects working on the campus.
Apple Park is the most lavish in a spate of glitzy new
architectural projects by tech titans at a time when their
businesses are booming and market valuations are soaring to new
heights. Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. have tapped top architects
Frank Gehry and Bjarke Ingels for expansions, Amazon is building
giant glass globes containing an indoor forest in Seattle, and
business-software company Salesforce.com Inc. paid to put its name
on a new, 61-story tower that will be the tallest building in San
Francisco.
"This is what rich, wealthy and powerful individuals have done
since the Pharaohs built the pyramids -- you build a building that
projects power to the world," said Louise Mozingo, an urban-design
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote a
book on corporate campuses.
The trend marks a departure for the tech industry, which long
eschewed the corporate palaces of banks and oil giants in favor of
bland, low-slung office buildings like those on Apple's existing
campus. Even headquarters viewed locally as lavish -- like former
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Silicon Valley campus -- had relatively
restrained designs.
"There's always been this strain of practicality in Silicon
Valley," said Randy Howder, principal at the San Francisco-based
architecture firm Gensler.
The new buildings are designed to project companies' identities.
Amazon, named after the rainforest, last week started planting
trees in the glass spheres at the base of its new Seattle
headquarters. Alphabet's latest design for a new Google building,
which it has been planning for a decade, calls for a public walkway
that goes through a building topped by a soaring glass canopy,
conveying openness. Facebook's Gehry-designed building, completed
in 2015, features plywood that embodies the informality of Mark
Zuckerberg, its hoodie-wearing chief executive.
Apple's late CEO, Steve Jobs, helped initiate the boom. In 2009,
he enlisted British architect Norman Foster, designer of the Hearst
Tower in New York, to help bring a showcase corporate headquarters
to Silicon Valley.
Apple, which recently set a record by topping $800 billion in
market capitalization, says the new campus is designed to bring
together disparate staff and foster collaboration to create new
products.
Since unveiling plans in 2011, Apple's design team has sought to
influence everything from sprinklers to door handles. It commanded
so much time of architects that Foster + Partners, which is based
in London, eventually opened an office in the Bay Area to better
manage requests, two architects said. They said Apple requested
fully constructed mockups of details like stairways for review
before construction, much as it builds prototypes of iPhones before
ramping production.
Foster + Partners didn't respond to requests for comment. Apple
declined to comment.
The call for a theater that resembled a MacBook Air suspended in
space resulted in a structure featuring a heavy, carbon-fiber roof
resting directly on glass walls. Architects and engineers had to
conceal wiring and fire-protection tubes in the joints between each
glass panel, the architects said. Guests will enter into the
structure, named the Steve Jobs Theater, and descend stairs to an
underground auditorium with 1,000 seats.
Some observers see signs of hubris in the architectural bonanza.
Ms. Mozingo, of UC Berkeley, believes Silicon Valley's current move
to trade flexible, bland workplaces for corporate statements could
backfire, tying companies to a place and hindering their ability to
relocate or innovate in a dynamic market.
"Once you invest that much cash, you become a different kind of
company, " Ms. Mozingo said.
Corporate palaces of years past have sometimes presaged a bad
turn in fortunes. Sun opened its new headquarters in 2000, around
the time the dot-com implosion started devastating its business.
The company was sold to Oracle Corp. in 2010 for $7.4 billion, a
fraction of its former valuation. Facebook, which took over Sun's
campus in 2011, left Sun's sign visible to remind employees of the
risks of becoming comfortable with success.
Write to Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com and Eliot Brown at
eliot.brown@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 15, 2017 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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