Apple's Missed Opportunity

Kaid Benfield, writing for Better! Cities & Towns, discusses Apple’s missed opportunity:

Instead, Apple chose to design its new headquarters as if it were a new consumer product, an “iBuilding” of sorts with a clean, high-concept design that reinforces the company’s futuristic corporate brand. In that sense, it probably succeeded: the building is cool-looking in an abstract sort of way, the kind of structure that will make people go “wow.” But it does nothing to make Silicon Valley a better environment for people, and might even make it harder to improve the walkability of Cupertino by sealing off potential walking routes.

In my previous post exploring the role of design philosophy I posited that the primary issue is that Apple’s design philosophy, while responsible for stunning hardware design, doesn’t scale well to urban design:

It is unfortunate that the ultimate design of incredible purity, minimalism, and rationality is so far from the mark. However, I think that it is more a problem of the underlying design philosophy than the implementation. At the urban scale, minimalism and rational purity just don’t work well. Urban life is necessarily complex, multifaceted, and sometimes irrational. The messiness of a thriving neighborhood or district cannot be eliminated through pure design because it isn’t a problem to be solved but rather a natural conclusion of a well functioning place. Life is messy. Life is irrational. Life is multifaceted. The best places embrace that and provide the services and connections necessary to thrive. This Apple campus instead turns its back on the world and becomes a cocoon of exceptional design purity.

It is disappointing that Apple, with all of its resources and design prowess, could be so far from the mark. It just goes to show that excellence in one discipline doesn’t necessarily translate to excellence in another.