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A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

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Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#411

Post by kuschku »

snowwrestler wrote: post #405
kuschku wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In urban planning, one has to be careful to solve the correct problem. The problem is not too many cars parked on a residential street. The problem is getting customers to businesses with minimal bad side effects. The problem is getting people to different places, without them using too much space within the city. This means as little car usage as possible. The example I mentioned – combined with cheap public trans…

Cheap public transit is an actual solution. Parking meters are just one way to get people to use it, and not a very good one: by the time people find out there are meters (when trying to park), it's too late to take the transit! The money it cost to install meters would have been better spent on a marketing campaign to raise awareness of the transit option, or subsidizing the transit prices.

Modern parking meter systems are very cheap — especially because you just put up one ticket automat every 200m where you can pay with cash, phone, debit card, etc and get a little printed slip of paper saying date and time until when you can park, and then put that in your car.

Veeery cheap compared to actual meters.

And no, no marketing campaign or subsidy can be as effective as the parking costs. As long as parking isn't at least twice or thrice as expensive as transit no one will use transit. Its a serious issue IRL here. For a while they even did free transit, ads on every single billboard, bus and train, and still people rather parked for 10$ a 30min in the cuty, or even parked illegally.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#412

Post by patrick_ranjit »

matsemann wrote: post #36

I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation? It's easy to say that most people drive, but that's only because everyone always make that the most convenient mode of transportation. With some effort something else could be even more convenient.

luckily, that could be converted later on. But it is a good point.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#413

Post by lvoudour »

sametmax wrote: post #45
poslathian wrote: post #33

5B for 13k employees - that's ~$384,000 in construction costs per head, operating and maintenance expenses are perhaps 5% of that annually (maybe more!) - taken together this is an office building that's costing apple ~$3500/head/mo . It's a beautiful office, but seriously? Avg apple cash comp is what, 12500/mo? 3500 is almost 30% of that!

You are missing the point. It's only an office because apple is a company. That could have been the great pyramids, saint sophia or notre dame. Your calculations are off because you don't realize that while a lot of servants are enjoying their life in the castle, it's been built for the royal family and its court.

Couldn't tell if you are being sarcastic, so excuse me for answering like you're not.

It doesn't match the artistic quality and cultural significance of st sophia or the pyramids, not even close. It's just a big glass and steel office space surrounded by a park. Sure the shape is not common, it's gonna have a few high-tech gimmicks and it carries the whole "apple" aesthetic, but it's rather blunt and feels generic (at least for me). Don't get me wrong, it's still a great project for what it is, just not the kind of project that you can call a monument a couple of centuries later

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#414

Post by sametmax »

lvoudour wrote: post #413
sametmax wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. It's only an office because apple is a company. That could have been the great pyramids, saint sophia or notre dame. Your calculations are off because you don't realize that while a lot of servants are enjoying their life in the castle, it's been built for the royal family and its court.

Couldn't tell if you are being sarcastic, so excuse me for answering like you're not. It doesn't match the artistic quality and cultural significance of st sophia or the pyramids, not even close. It's just a big glass and steel office space surrounded by a park. Sure the shape is not common, it's gonna have a few high-tech gimmicks and it carries the whole "apple" aesthetic, but it's rather blunt and feels generic (a…

> It doesn't match the artistic quality and cultural significance of st sophia or the pyramids

That's what you think of it. But again, it's not been building for you. It's been built for the rich people at the top of Apple. It's massive. It's designed like an apple product. It fits their purpose of symbolism, the success of design and money, a place to put all their collections of brains for show.

What you think of it, your taste, or any feeling you can have about it is completely insignificant to them. They have the exactly the pony they want. It represents exactly what they want it to, like said monument represented exactly what the people that paid for it wanted it to.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#415

Post by kuschku »

snowwrestler wrote: post #404
valuearb wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't kill businesses, it will move them. No business has the right to a specific location if it requires it's neighbors properties to.

First of all, public street parking, even in front of houses, is not "property." Second, if urban planning is done properly, residential streets don't experience parking problems. That's the whole point of this thread. And if urban planning is not done well, then it doesn't matter where businesses move--they'll still run into problems. Oh, and if they all leave, then the neighbors will have a nice blighted block with…

> if urban planning is done properly, residential streets don't experience parking problems. That's the whole point of this thread.

If urban planning is done properly, there are no residential streets. Every street mixes residential, offices, and commercial properties.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#416

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jt2190 wrote: post #200

Anyone here work at one of Foster's other buildings? (Berlin Reichstag, the Hong Kong airport, and London’s infamous “Gherkin” tower, etc.). How about Steve's Pixar HQ? What's the day to day experience like?

No experience but the BBC has an interesting series on Norman Foster and some of his contemporaries: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vgz7r (iPlayer).

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#417

Post by smackfu »

macNchz wrote: post #140
mxfh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-peo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067658

From the linked article re Cupertino: > For a fast-food restaurant, the city demands one space for every three seats; for a bowling alley, seven spaces per lane plus one for every worker. I've read a bunch of articles about the negative externalities of minimum parking requirements, but haven't really seen one explore the why behind these rules. What does it matter to the city if a bowling alley doesn't have enough p…

I've seen cities use these parking requirements to de facto give the zoning board more power over development. A downtown business might be required to have 10 parking spots but the city doesn't even want anyone to build parking lots so they will give an exception... after demanding changes to the design.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#418

Post by yazan94 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #118
yazan94 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the case of firing, are they unable to take care of the child themselves at home? Yes, they are unable because that would hinder them from getting another job. > I understand that on-site childcare wouldn't work for everyone, but it could work for some, and be a benefit to them. > Other companies DO provide it. Whats the difference between a daycare at your work or at a separate daycare building?

> Whats the difference between a daycare at your work or at a separate daycare building? Lower cost and fewer logistical issues I would imagine. You've just removed a 10~45 minute round trip commute to that separate building. That's twice a day every day, and if the kid gets sick or injured.

That's a good point I didn't think of actually. Forgot about the extra commute time to/from the daycare.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#419

Post by pythonaut_16 »

valuearb wrote: post #213
dingo_bat wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is indeed a picture of a "pod". It is a claustrophobic closet with glass doors. I have been in elevators I'd rather work in.

It's got a huge glass wall, how is that claustrophobic? It's far superior to an open floor plan. I've built out office space for my 40 person engineering group before with individual one person offices. They had doors to shut and most had windows (but not all, all offices have interior space, and space being expensive need to be used), but all had some amount of glass to their hallways. And they all loved them. Apple…

> I'll bet you can't name any other large company that's made such a large commitment to personal work space.

Pixar (whose HQ was designed by none other than Steve Jobs)

https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblo...

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#420

Post by joubert »

valuearb wrote: post #387
jt2190 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone should note that Louise Mozingo has criticized the Apple campus... The quote from the article appears to be related to Apple Park's lack of a childcare facility. (I assume they can easily remedy this.) I can't find any of her criticism elsewhere. Mind sharing some links? (edit: Found something from 2011. No mention of the interior space though. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/10/entertainment/la-ca-..…

'For all the time and money sunk into the project, some in the architecture community question whether Apple has focused on the right ends. The campus is something of an exception to the trend of radically open offices aimed at fostering collaboration, said Louise Mozingo, a professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at U.C. Berkeley. Its central office building – a mas…

I would love to see Louise Mozingo's workspace. A brief google didn't turn up anything useful.
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