Apple Park in Cupertino, California

About

A circle is whole, continuous, unbroken, closed. Its shape implies completeness, a kind of unified perfection. Apple Park, Apple’s ring-shaped new headquarters designed by Foster + Partners, invites interpretation; it is a building and a symbol. Located in Cupertino, California, Apple Park is a 21st-century update of the mid-20th-century corporate office campus, enhanced with environmental sensitivity and an emphasis on employee wellness. In most of the United States, the suburban corporate campus has fallen out of fashion as a business ideal. Many companies have returned at least part of their operations to central cities, locations that younger educated workers are believed to prefer. The technology companies of Silicon Valley, however, have largely bucked this trend with an ever-sprawling footprint, with all the ensuing environmental and social burdens that this entails. Apple’s grand investment in Cupertino cements its suburban identity, and by extension, the suburban Bay Area as the dominant landscape of the technology industry in the United States. The corporate campuses of the mid-20th century were built on greenfield sites. The best of them, like Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, or the John Deere Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, exuded the optimism of postwar America and its booming economy. These campuses presented a forward-looking (if somewhat sterile) view of work life and corporate innovation. New products and ideas would spring from an isolated company culture and then be disseminated to the world by truck and plane and through broadcast and print media. These campuses also signaled white flight, the accelerating decentralization of the American urban landscape, and the dominance of the automobile.

Sources

• Arquitectura Viva