From the Philip´s Langdon article, pictures courtesy of Alan Hess:
The reviews of Apple's proposed headquarters in Cupertino, California, are coming in, and they're the opposite of the accolades that the company's consumer products receive.
Though plenty of people are ecstatic about the iPod and the iPad, few knowledgeable individuals are impressed with Apple's facilities planning, which seems decades out of date. Architecture critics such as Alan Hess at the San Jose Mercury News and Christopher Hawthorne at The Los Angeles Times have recently given the headquarters—a gigantic glass donut of a building—a much-deserved drubbing.
Steve Jobs, before he stepped down as Apple's CEO, released renderings of the building, which is to have four-story walls of glass that curve continuously to form an enormous circle, over four stories of underground parking. The perimeter of the 150-acre property is to be fenced to keep the public away.
"It's a little like a spaceship landed," The Times quoted Jobs as saying of the building, which is intended to hold 12,000 employees and have its own power plant, fueled by natural gas. Jobs expressed pride that Apple had chosen the design despite the fact that a curved building "is not the cheapest way to build something." (...)
Some aspects of the choice surely reflect the predilections of the architect, Foster + Partners. Norman Foster's firm, though celebrated, has repeatedly paid inadequate attention to human scale and urban context.
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