201–210 of 221 posts
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One thing I cringed at in Jobs' presentation was framing the 4-story high design as "human scale". The Empire State Building is also human scale.
It means that the building doesn't overwhelm you. Like the buildings in Paris for example.
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Cupertino "downtown" is a joke (I used to work there)... it's basically the intersection of two large streets (Stevens Creek at De Anza). Likewise Sunnyvale and Santa Clara are quite anemic, but Los Gatos, Saratoga and even Los Altos aren't bad. MV and PA are great places to dine. Cupertino is the only town I've worked in that never had a downtown.
Apple should just make an underground Cupertino downtown at that site.
I can't even remember how many days I got to work when the sun was coming up and left as it was setting, or after it set. It was like a perpetual winter.
I don't know, I worked in a campus with a huge courtyard in the middle, though smaller than this, and it was mostly wasted unused space. I think it actually makes different parts of the company feel more isolated from each other because the other side of the building is so far way, the middle almost feels like an intimidating wilderness that you stay away from. If instead you have multiple smaller buildings connected…
I've worked as a contractor at apple and that interior courtyard can't be reached without having a working badge. Outsiders have to get a temp badge and be escorted. When you're inside, everyone you encounter will be an Apple employee or contractor and not random people off the street. Which could be a problem for Apple, because there are tons of tourists that come by to have their picture taken. You really don't wan…
I, too, worked as a contractor at Apple for a while and it was a little depressing how few people actually used the interior courtyard. Occasionally I would have my coffee out there to enjoy the sunshine, take some notes and people watch, but mostly it was an empty space that collected dead leaves and dust. My impression of the cafes in every building is that they were slightly subsidized to encourage employees to take their coffee break without leaving (which has the added benefit of avoiding potential leaks). Every aspect of life at Apple is highly controlled (to a degree, some areas less than others), so it isn't surprising that this extends to the cafeterias, stores, cafes, parking and even the printers.
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It sounds like you're treating an Apple building downtown differently than any other skyscraper. It's still just a big tower filled with people. Are you saying that SF is literally bursting at the seams and that it can't support another big office tower? What about the giant Transbay development plan? If you're going to stuff 12,000+ people anywhere, it's better to do it in an already dense area to take advantage of…
Yes. That is what I am saying. That even if Apple could make the building itself as green as conceivably possible, simply moving 12,000 people's workplaces to the city of San Francisco would create additional problems and be a net negative. If you want to call that "bursting at the seams" that's fine, but Apple isn't in a position to reengineer the whole dysfunctional city of San Francisco.
I'm imagining what San Francisco reengineered by Apple would be like. Somewhere on the same continuum as Disneyworld and the Las Vegas strip, but with rounded edges, lots of greenery and a social order similar to Singapore.
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Palo Alto and Mountain View have real places; the rest is pretty much all miserable sprawl. I miss working in downtown Palo Alto.
Cupertino "downtown" is a joke (I used to work there)... it's basically the intersection of two large streets (Stevens Creek at De Anza). Likewise Sunnyvale and Santa Clara are quite anemic, but Los Gatos, Saratoga and even Los Altos aren't bad. MV and PA are great places to dine. Cupertino is the only town I've worked in that never had a downtown.
Sunnyvale didn't really until they started building a clone of Santana Row that went belly up with the housing crash. Well I guess Historic Murphy Avenue sort of counted.
I work in a small office park located quite similarly on a grassy field locked entirely by some freeways and other large roads, though the buildings here are cheap and ugly, but even if they weren't, it'd still totally suck. It's isolated, not a part of the city, essentially, it's just a large parking lot (most of which is below the ground, but that doesn't really change anything). It's quite disappointing. Maybe it'…
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Has Apple found a way to make the sun shine from the North? Otherwise I think there will be rooms that are better than others in the round spaceship, too.
On the other hand: no privileged corner offices.
This isn't impressive to me. What would be impressive would be building a skyscraper in downtown SF. Being environmentally friendly isn't building a massive campus on a plot of suburban grassland. Apple likes to say they think differently, but this isn't different. It's just slightly nicer than most other headquarters in a suburban wasteland.
In any other city I think this would be a more valid point. But San Francisco is tiny. A lot of people really don't grok just how geographically small the place is. An Apple move to downtown SF would be incredibly disruptive, would generate epic amounts of traffic on already extremely congested roads, would doubtless increase pollution and energy expense, and price thousands of families out of SF neighborhoods as wea…