Why Apple's New Campus Is Bad for Urban America | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple's New Campus Is Bad for Urban America

theatlanticcities.com

18 pointsbrown9-216 comments

I think what this person forgets is that some people don't want to live in a city. They like driving their cars everywhere. Apple doesn't want to build a suburb in their campus. They want it to be a great place for employees to do great work.

I think in time this will bite Apple. Case in point is Google v. Amazon v. Microsoft in the Seattle area. Google: buildings in a funky neighborhood with lots of amenities. Amazon: buildings just north of downtown in cool neighborhood. Microsoft: commute to suburban Redmond where things get... blander.

I meet lots of go-get-em younger engineers who cross Microsoft off their list of potential employers on the basis of being in Redmond. Microsoft has to bus the hipsters from Capitol Hill.

For better or for worse, a more suburban kind of campus will likely scare off younguns in favor of older, more family-oriented, more car-dependent employees.

Don't forget that Google's headquarters is in a sprawling campus near the suburbs in Mountain View... with a small Microsoft campus near by. Your hypothetical "hipster" choosing between Google, Microsoft, and Apple in the bay area is choosing between bland suburbs and bland suburbs.

Google also buses people in from San Francisco... which you have to admit beats the hell out of having them all drive in... or even take up seats on public transit for that matter.

Bay Area Google sounds a lot like Microsoft in terms of bussing people in from SF.

And good point--I guess most of the super big tech players in the valley are located in the bland suburbs.

Oh cmon, this is minutes from the rest of the Apple buildings in the area, they aren't moving to a suburban campus, they are consolidating their suburban campuses.

I spent a bunch of time in "outlier" Apple buildings (Bubb 5, and something way out near Moffet Field after the Loma Prieta earthquake took out Apple's main engineering building). While being off campus is good for secrecy, it's terrible if you need to cooperate with other parts of the company.

You really need colocation to make things work. I expect two things out of this building:

First, it will improve a bunch of Apple's internal processes.

Second, they will run out of room sooner than they think, and I'd put money on them not even releasing leases on many outlier buildings.

I worked in the main Apple complex (R&D5 on Infinite Loop) and it seems like they're just doubling down on what worked well before. It was really nice in there to have a little private park interior space to lie on the grass or have parties and it was really practical to be able to park underneath (when there was space) and to be able to subdivide slices (at some level of granularity) to let members of different groups have a floor or a building to themselves. So this will be just like that but on a bigger scale and with more parkland to relax in and on, a more size-appropriate meeting space and not so much located in the middle of a vast sea of parking lot.

This will take a long time to build and move into, but once they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually manage to buy out that "missing piece" and incorporate it into the plan. One step at a time...

The article is correct in so far as the new Apple building is not consistent with contemporary urban design principles.

Curved glass aside, it's basically The Pentagon of 1943 in so far as functional layout goes combined with 1957's site planning for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company plopped in the middle of a contemporary bedroom community's street grid.

What it lacks in comparison to both is any sense of urban scaled outdoor space (the courtyards between rings of the Pentagon and Noguchi's courtyards for the SOM design).

Apple's new building is what Robert Venturi would call "A duck."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Pentagon_January_2008....

http://www.som.com/local/common/modules/gallery/dsp_image_ga...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Duck

His complaint that you won't be able to walk across the campus is silly -- the current HP campus is fenced off too.

And I'm not really sure who would be walking where across it anyway. It's bordered on the south side by I-280. There is a strip mall on the other side of Wolfe, on the west side, but immediately to the east is office buildings and a Kaiser Permanente facility -- well, I guess there is some housing on the other side of Tantau, but not much, and east of that is Lawrence Expressway.

It's only across Homestead on the north side that there is much of a residential area.

In short, I don't see that there are many people who would walk across the campus even if they could.

(I live a couple of miles away, and drive by it all the time.)

A ridiculous post - this campus is GREAT for Cupertino... but then Cupertino isn't really Urban America.

I kind of like all the trees that you see on the new campus. From the ground, the trees even obstruct most of the building. I don't think the extra distance matters much on a bike but I guess if you're walking in that area it's an extra 10 minutes.

Maybe Apple can build a maglev down that main street so people can more easily commute to work and really reduce traffic. Only joking, of course, but Apple does have enough cash to build the high-speed rail from LA to SF.

I agree with many of the authors points, prefer downtown/midtown style development and, broadly, think that architecture since the world wars has been an abomination foisted on us by academics and lunatics, implemented by incompetents.

However, I'd like to make one point: it's Apple's money, they can do what they want.

> However, I'd like to make one point: it's Apple's money, they can do what they want.

The city has an "Environmental Impact Review" process whereby citizens OF CUPERTINO at least have the right to whine about it a bit and plead for a few more concessions here and there to "community values". But there's no chance this isn't going through - Apple is by far the biggest taxpayer in Cupertino and the threat that they might move somewhere else if they couldn't do this here is too potent.

Plus it's, you know, kind of cool.

Meh, I thought the article had some well-meaning but mostly overwrought handwringing, however the comments there were Youtube-level stupid.

They're replacing a massive campus covered in parking lots with orchards. They are building an underground parking garage. They're planting thousands of trees. They're building foot paths, they've hired an arborist to make tree selection, they're brining orange groves back to silicon valley. They've designed probably the GREENest campus I've ever seen....

What's not seen on these drawings is the underground freeway[1] that takes cars off of the streets and into the campus, to the parking garages, and other facilities. This means a lot of surface concrete that would be required to support these employees is hidden, leaving more room for grass and trees.

What's wrong with that?

These people would actually RATHER that hugely inefficient parking lot that HP built? Really?

Orange groves are nice but they're not necessarily a great form of land use in an urban area. If you build an orange grove in one location then the housing and everything else that could have otherwise been there gets pushed farther out. Distances between things increase and people have to travel farther.

It might become a great campus, but do I think something higher density with a mix of uses would be more environmentally friendly.

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