At Last: Apple's New "Spaceship" HQ Design Is Criticised

At last, someone has criticised Apple's plans for a new "spaceship" headquarters at Cupertino in California.

The architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Hawthorne, says it's harking back to "suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and '70s". He also criticises members of Cupertino City Council for virtually nodding the plans through and being uncritical.

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.

Now that Jobs, who underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004 and a liver transplant two years ago, has announced he is stepping down as Apple CEO, the new headquarters building has taken on the symbolism of an architectural curtain call. It is the last of Apple's products that Jobs — whose influence on contemporary design is wide-ranging and justifiably celebrated — is likely to help shape. As such it seems ripe for the kind of analysis that he and the company are eager to forestall.

One question the council members might have asked Jobs is simple: Who's your architect? Jobs likes to promote the notion that he is personally involved in designing virtually all of Apple's buildings — including the impressive Apple retail stores that first opened in 2001 and were largely produced by the architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. In his appearance before the City Council he said Apple had "hired some great architects to work with — some of the best in the world, I think." But he never mentioned the high-wattage name of Norman Foster or the London firm Foster + Partners, whose logo is stamped on the preliminary plans for the campus. (Those plans are available for download on Cupertino's website, cupertino.org.)

It is a measure of Jobs' tight grip on Apple's reputation for in-house design innovation that even after hiring a celebrity architect like Foster he would keep that architect's name under wraps; even now, three months after Jobs took the plans public in that council meeting, the Apple press office refuses to confirm that Foster + Partners indeed designed the project.

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