Apple's new HQ: Cool or a 'retrograde cocoon'?

Not everyone is stoked about Apple's plan for a sprawling, spaceship-like new office

The sleek design for Apple's new suburban HQ initially garnered praise, but now critics are taking another look at the isolated corporate campus.
(Image credit: Apple Inc., Cuptertino City)

In June, Steve Jobs presented the Cupertino City Council with plans for a huge, spaceship-like headquarters for Apple. As with any Apple product, commentators were quick to fawn over the building's supposedly revolutionary design, and the council seemed to roll over in agreement. But now, one architecture critic is calling the building a "retrograde cocoon," and says it doesn't conjure the future so much as it does 1960s corporate architecture. Is it really so bad?

Yes. It's old-fashioned and isolated: Already, Apple "makes products lusted over by young urbanites around the world from deep within a quiet, low-rise realm, far from any skyscraper or subway line," says Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times. The new HQ threatens to alienate Apple even more. The proposed building is isolated and inefficient, a prime example of "pastoral capitalism" and the suburban corporate sprawl that sprang up after World War II. It's "essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up