Whatever the motive, it represents an encouraging trend in high-tech corporate headquarters away from the sprawl of yore. More likely, Amazon knows that attracting good workers means being close to amenities. Perhaps the famously frugal Jeff Bezos simply wanted to build fewer expensive underground parking spaces than the 10,000 subterranean spots that Apple has planned for Cupertino. I won’t assume that they did it for urbanist reasons. In the meantime, props to Amazon for building densely, in the city, a few blocks from Westlake Station. It’s impossible to fully consider the city without doing so. This may be why all transit thinkers inevitably come face-to-face with urban design, building design, and even complex systems like education and health care delivery. It’s no coincidence that Hustwit ended his trilogy with Urbanized. Then again, Jobs was never much interested in complex ecosystems he couldn’t completely control. By contrast, Apple’s campus won’t let employees open the windows. For example, smart building design these days often involves letting the outside world in as much as possible to minimize energy costs. Now we recognize them as part of a complex ecosystem involving streets, sidewalks and transit.
Thus, the Apple campus represents the apotheosis of a time when we thought of buildings as distinct objects, like iPads. He was born and raised in the postwar Bay Area suburbs, and even became obsessed with the specific style of suburban tract home he grew up in. Steve Jobs may have been a genius, but he was also – to quote The Big Lebowski – a man for his time and place. But it’s also a paean to a bygone era of suburban sprawl. (By “complex,” I mean in terms of the sheer number of people involved.) Apple products are featured prominently in Objectified, and Apple’s new campus is clearly an effort to create a building that could be featured in that film. One way to think about these films is that they move outward in considering increasingly complex forms of design: graphic design, product design, and finally urban design. If you’re a design nerd like me, you may be familiar with Gary Hustwit’s trilogy of films, Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.
#A billion wicked thoughts amazon zip#
Still, when the opportunity arises for one of the world’s most admired companies to completely reconfigure a huge swath of one of the world’s wealthiest ZIP codes, it’s reasonable to expect something more than a re-hash of the classic suburban office park, beautiful as it may be. To be fair, Apple’s proposal is no worse than in urbanist terms than the headquarters of most Silicon Valley titans of its vintage, such as HP, Yahoo!, and Oracle. Several blogs have already commented on how Apple’s proposal violates all sorts of urbanist principles, especially when compared to Google’s New York City office or the new Twitter offices in San Francisco.
Looking at the plans, it’s hard not to contrast Amazon’s project with the proposed Apple campus in Cupertino. At 2.65 million square feet, it’s roughly equal to what Amazon already leases between Denny Triangle and South Lake Union. Somewhat intriguingly, Clise Properties is “hoping and expecting” that Amazon will eventually buy all 13-acres Clise owns in the Denny Triangle (wishful thinking?).
Plans call for more than 13 million square feet of office space, in addition to the 2.7 million square feet that Amazon already leases in the Downtown – South Lake Union area. By now you’ve probably heard that Amazon is planning three new office towers in downtown Seattle.
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