“THE SPACESHIP” A rendering of Sir Norman Foster’s design for Apple’s new headquarters, in Cupertino, California. The building’s circumference will be nearly a mile.
On Alpine Road in Portola Valley, a few miles southwest of the campus of Stanford University, where the flat suburban landscape begins to give way to the vistas of the Santa Cruz Mountains, there is an old wooden roadhouse called the Alpine Inn, where college students drink beer and wine at old wooden tables carved with initials. It’s as if Mory’s, the venerable Yale hangout, were housed in a western frontier tavern out of a John Wayne movie. The locals, who call the place Zott’s, a contraction of Rossotti’s, the name of long-ago owners, claim it has the best hamburgers for miles around, but what makes the place notable isn’t what it serves. Affixed to the wall near the front door is a small bronze plaque that reads:
ON AUGUST 27, 1976, SCIENTISTS FROM SRI INTERNATIONAL CELEBRATED THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF TESTS BY SENDING AN ELECTRONIC MESSAGE FROM A COMPUTER SET UP AT A PICNIC TABLE BEHIND THE ALPINE INN. THE MESSAGE WAS SENT VIA A RADIO NETWORK TO SRI AND ON THROUGH A SECOND NETWORK, THE ARPANET, TO BOSTON. THIS EVENT MARKED THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERNET AGE.
That the world’s first e-mail was sent from a picnic table outside at Zott’s goes well with the rest of Silicon Valley lore, like the founding of Hewlett-Packard in one garage and Apple in another. It reminds you that for a long time the most striking thing about the appearance of Silicon Valley was how ordinary it was, how much it looked like everyplace else, or at least like every other collection of reasonably prosperous American suburbs, whatever may have been going on in its garages and whatever some geeks may have done over beers at Zott’s 37 years ago. Yes, Silicon Valley has Stanford, with its vast and beautiful campus, and some handsome mountain scenery marking its western edge, but the rest of the place has always been made up of neighborhoods and landmarks that could have been almost anywhere else, like the 101 Freeway and the strip malls and supermarkets and car dealerships and motels and low-rise office parks. Most of Silicon Valley is suburban sprawl, plain and simple, its main artery a wide boulevard called El Camino Real that might someday possess some degree of urban density but now could be on the outskirts of Phoenix. Zott’s is what passes for local color, but even this spirited roadhouse has a certain generic look to it. You could imagine it being almost anywhere out West, the same way that so much of Silicon Valley looks like generic suburbia.
And even after a few people began doing unusual things in their garages, and other people started inventing things in the university’s laboratories, and even after some of these turned into the beginnings of large corporations, some of which became successful beyond anyone’s imagination—even these things didn’t make Silicon Valley look all that different from everyplace else. The tech companies got bigger and bigger, but that has generally just meant that the sprawl sprawled farther. There was certainly nothing about the physical appearance of these few square miles that told you it was the place that had generated more wealth than anywhere else in our time.
Until now, that is. In June of 2011, four months before his death, Steve Jobs appeared before the City Council of Cupertino, where Apple’s headquarters are located. It was the last public appearance Jobs would make, and if it did not have quite the orchestrated panache of his carefully staged product unveilings in San Francisco, it was fixed even more on the future than the latest iPhone. Jobs was presenting the designs for a new headquarters building that Apple proposed to build, and that the City Council would have to approve. It was a structure unlike any other that his company, or any other in the world, had ever built: a glass building in the shape of a huge ring, 1,521 feet in diameter (or nearly five football fields), and its circumference would curve for nearly a mile. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster, the British-born architect known for the elegance of his work and for the uncompromising nature of his sleek, modern aesthetic—close to Jobs’s own. In a community that you could almost say has prided itself on its indifference to architecture, Apple, which had already changed the nature of consumer products, seemed now to want to try to do nothing less than change Silicon Valley’s view of what buildings should be.
Source:http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/01/apple-facebook-google-headquarters-architecture
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