
Why Apple's New Campus Is Bad for Urban America - brown9-2
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/why-apples-new-campus-anti-urban/1473/
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RandallBrown
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.

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peatmoss
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.

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rhubarbquid
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.

~~~
peatmoss
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.

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brudgers
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Pentagon_January_2008.jpg)

[http://www.som.com/local/common/modules/gallery/dsp_image_ga...](http://www.som.com/local/common/modules/gallery/dsp_image_gallery.cfm/connecticut_general_insurance?galleryCategoryID=504223&ImageIndex=1)

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

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ScottBurson
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.)

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

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melling
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.

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carsongross
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.

~~~
glenra
> 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.

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

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nirvana
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?

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mwd_
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.

