Critics Calling Out Apple 2 Campus Design

About a week after the City of Cupertino posted more detailed plans of the proposed Apple 2 campus the critics began weighing in, starting with a stinging review in the Los Angeles Times, and continuing with a few sharp words from the local press.

“Apples new campus will be a retrograde cocoon,” reads the headline on the Sept. 10 piece by Times’ Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne.

Hawthorne takes the Cupertino City Council to task for not being more inquisitive (“borderline sycophantic reaction” were words used) when , and says the project is “practically bursting with contradictions.”

He counters Jobs’ comment to the council that “it’s a little like a spaceship landed” by calling the campus “a doggedly old-fashioned proposal,” harkening back to the Pentagon’s design, as well as “the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and ‘70s.”

And, Hawthorne points out, “though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car makes a different argument.”

That dependence on the automobile was called out loud and clear at , where almost 100 people gathered to comment on the project, slated to replace the current Hewlett Packard campus at the corner of Wolfe Road and Pruneridge Avenue.

Nearly every discussion group formed to bubble up points to be considered in the EIR brought up “traffic” as a major issue. And while Apple 2 Project Manager Terry Reagan tried to highlight Apple’s employee bus transportation program, he shared plans that include parking structures for 9,000 cars.

At least one resident wondered aloud about building in more mass transit options, and one discussion group suggested Apple’s own freeway exist from Interstate 280.

San Jose Mercury architecture writer Alan Hess called the project, “both impressive and puzzling.”

He calls it impressive for being “elegantly simple”, yet puzzling because of how “conventional it is conceptually. It breaks almost no new ground in reshaping the Silicon Valley workplace”

Hess’ criticisms include the fact that the “enormous circular structure” will be “utterly imperceptible to anyone using it,” and the impracticality of a spread out building, with nearly a one-third mile walk for employees having to cross the inside hole of the donut-shaped building.

John King, the San Francisco Chronicle Urban Design Critic, asked parenthetically in his piece on Sept. 8 if employees would be issued Segways.

And Hess touches on something else residents brought up last week: why a design that fences the property off? He asks, as did residents, why not find a way to let the public have some access to the acres of landscaping planned by Apple?

King was actually a little less critical, saying that for “Planet Cupertino” the building might actually work.

The reviews have sparked some Internet traffic in blogs and on Twitter, as everyone begins weighing in on what Hawthorne suggested has “taken on the symbolism of an architectural curtain call,” for an ailing Jobs.