Phony? Apple's spaceship hits turbulence as it gets ready to land
Nowhere are more Apple fans to be found than in Cupertino, California, where Apple's spaceship HQ is due to land any year now. Now a reality note has been injected into the proceedings by San Jose Mercury News columnist Troy Wolverton.
Cabin crew: Doors to manual!
He writes that to fans of the spaceship ," the most important thing is that it will provide Silicon Valley with the landmark it's long lacked."
Then he delivers this zinger, "I'd suggest those fans, including my fellow columnist Scott Herhold, have been bamboozled by the company's infamous "reality distortion field."
"Apple's new campus is going to be a traffic nightmare that offers little benefit to the surrounding community. Instead of being a symbol for Silicon Valley, it will be emblematic of urban planning gone way wrong."
Even worse he says , the project can be "characterised by a word that will make Apple and its fans shudder: phony.
"The forest park surrounding the spaceship building, which seems to have captured the fans' imagination almost as much as the building itself, is as inauthentic as the felt and leather backgrounds that Apple recently excised from iOS, the software underlying the iPhone.
Wolverton describes the forest as "merely a fig leaf -- a greenwashing, if you will -- for a behemoth development that's too large for its neighborhood and designed without any consideration to its context. It's completely out of place."
Whatever the project's architectural merits, the spaceship building is going to be huge.
At 2.8 million square feet, it will be one of the largest buildings in the US, more space even than New York's Empire State Building .
Apple says the spaceship's actual footprint will be smaller than the existing buildings on the site, because its floor space will be spread across four stories. But there will be more to the campus than just the spaceship.
"Add up the buildings that will house the corporate fitness center, the parking garage and an auditorium, and you get nearly 6 million square feet of space, which is within spitting distance of the size of the Pentagon.
"That size doesn't belong smack dab in the middle of single-family homes and strip malls. Would you want the Empire State Building or the Pentagon in your backyard?"
The new campus will accommodate 14,200 workers, some 12,000 in the spaceship alone. That's nearly three times the number of people who currently work in buildings on the 176-acre site.
"Is it any wonder that the environmental report commissioned by the city of Cupertino expects widespread and severe traffic problems around the proposed site?"
So if you already are frustrated by traffic jams in the area, just wait until the Apple project gets built!
In addition to terrible traffic, neighbors can also expect to have Apple employees and visitors to the campus parking en masse in their neighborhood- because Apple is providing fewer than 11,000 parking spots on the campus for use by both employees and visitors.
For all those traffic and parking problems, nearby residents can expect little benefit from the project, says Wolverton.
"Those bucolic scenes of people walking through the forested grounds or eating lunch in the grass near the spaceship? Those will all be employees -- assuming they're able to break away from their desks. Apple says the campus will be closed to the public, and a fence around the perimeter of the property will guarantee that. "
Area restaurants and shops shouldn't get too excited about having Apple move into the neighborhood, because employees are likely to stick to campus most of the time.
"As for the great architectural icon that my colleague Scott Herhold salivates over, it's going to be largely invisible to the public, hidden behind all those trees. Sure, the outside world might be able to catch some glimpses of it from certain angles, but passers-by won't be able to see the entire building.
"It will be a landmark that can't really be seen. All the public will see is the traffic mess it has caused," says Wolverton .
Wolverton's colleague Scott Herhold doesn't agree, Acknowledging that there will be traffic problems ,he writes : "For better or worse, you can see in this building something of Steve Jobs' quest for immortality -- the evolution of Apple from garage to office building to campus to an elegant structure that echoes his products. In itself, that is a story worth telling. "
And the readers are in favour ,too. In a poll 64.9 per cent thought the project would be good for Silicon Valley with just 35.09 giving it the thumbs down. Cuperton council last week cleared the project for lift-off - unanimously . Demolition work starts in November.