Retail Oriented
At the latest Apple store, Jobs is in the details.
By Andrew Blum
The Metropolis Observed
June 2004
If the new Apple store in San Francisco looks like a Powerbook computer,
it wasn’t deliberate. According to Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior
vice president of retail, the store’s design was simply a result of
a consistent “internal logic” that seeks “to get
everything out of the way and create the most pure thing possible.”
The result is a branding koan: Apple’s corporate philosophy is
design, so its store design is a philosophy. “There’s no
design aesthetic for our stores,” Johnson says. “We tried to
just make them what we love.”
Here is a Zen guide to the San Francisco Apple store. Any similarity to
their computers can’t be helped—because who is Apple to
question essential truths?
Facade
The facade’s expanse of stainless steel may mimic the exterior of
the Powerbook laptop, but it’s strictly functional. “These
stores work better as closed-in boxes,” architect Karl Backus, from
the Berkeley office of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, points out.
The glowing white logo then becomes an inevitability—the most
minimal symbol of what’s inside. The store blurs the lines between
brand, architecture, and industrial design; it is simultaneously
building, box, and billboard.
Stairs
The hardware for the glass staircase at the center of the store was
developed with the same engineering-and-fabrication team that worked on
the Louvre pyramid and the Rose Planetarium. But here they took Apple
CEO Steve Jobs’s advice on a minute detail: the securing
hardware—a standard item called a pig-nose bolt—was redesigned
to have three indentations instead of two. The result looks just like
the pin that attaches the iMac’s screen to its stainless-steel
neck. But rather than a coy design pun, Apple insists their similarity
derives from what could be called “metabranding”—both
spring from the same philosophy. “A common vision leads to
complementary solutions,” Johnson says.
Ventilation
The architects at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, who collaborated with Eight
Inc. on the store’s interiors, like to point out that when they
first developed this HVAC grill for the Soho Apple store in New York,
the similarly perforated case of the G5 computer was still on the
drawing boards. But does that mean they were an inspiration? Although
Jonathan Ives, head of Apple’s industrial-design team, does like to
meet with store architects and offer his opinion on the company’s
retail design, Apple says no. The right design is the right
design—whether it’s cooling an Apple store or an Apple
computer. |
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