How Jony Ive Masterminded Apple’s New Headquarters

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jony-ive-masterminded-apples-new-headquarters-1501063201

by breck • 9 years ago

41 31 9 years ago

wsj.com

galonk• 9 years ago

Finding out the whole thing is open-plan-only cured me of most of my jealousy.

peapicker• 9 years ago

Yikes. A sexy building with an anti-developer environmental setup. I'll stay in my high-walled cubeland.

supercoder• 9 years ago

Apple are design focused, and so with it comes the focus collaboration. People isolating themselves is not good for productivity and teamwork.

hprotagonist2• 9 years ago

me, too. We have yet to invent a noise-canceling headphone good enough.

pwthornton• 9 years ago

In-ear headphones that are basically ear plugs work quite well. Their comfort, however, for long-term use may be another story. But you can pretty much isolate out any normal volume.

new299• 9 years ago

That's really weird. I thought Apple liked having little secret projects everywhere. Even having access control between teams for secret special projects.

If it's open plan how will that happen?

dejv2• 9 years ago

Well, there are couple of R&D buildings next to main building on campus. I can't find much details about those, but I suspect that they will be used for those secret projects.

maxxxxx2• 9 years ago

Open plan doesn't mean the whole building is one giant open office. The building will be a lot of smaller open spaces and some can be isolated from others.

valuearb• 9 years ago

They've already shown off the one person offices, there will be lots of them.

hodder• 9 years ago

given the Google workaround no longer works, how can we read wsj articles now?

dejv2• 9 years ago

I do search headline on Twitter and click on link.

bradbatt• 9 years ago

Links from Facebook still work. Put this in a bookmarklet…

  javascript:window.location="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

slededit2• 9 years ago

Get a wsj subscription?

xiaoma• 9 years ago

That solution doesn't scale to all HN users and all sites. If there's no way to access an article without paying, it's a pretty poor choice to share it here.

jkoll• 9 years ago

https://outline.com/

LeoNatan252• 9 years ago

Design over usability; not the first time Ive has made this sin. That open space is completely impractical, and I expect a lot of people will be less productive. Terrible.

qq66• 9 years ago

I find the iPhone to be one of the most usable pieces of technology ever made. I've seen 2-year-olds and 80-year-olds acquire mastery of it in a day. iTunes, on the other hand...

LeoNatan252• 9 years ago

iPhone's design, as in its software design, largely should be credited to the teams under Forstall. Ive, at that point, was responsible for hardware design mostly. Most of the principles that made iOS (iPhone OS) successful back then remain today—in fact, it is amazing how little has changed and how relevant the design still is.

maxxxxx2• 9 years ago

Looks like a big ego trip to me. The whole building looks very stark.

nikofeyn• 9 years ago

i just don't understand it. the idolization of ive as a designer is truly confusing to me. i feel a sense of stubbornness and tunnel vision in his approach, which seems rather amateurish, for all of his designs.

for example, the article suggests ive wants movement to be at the core of the workplace. how does endless seas of rectangles promote movement?! just look at those pictures! there is not a single design element that isn't founded upon a rectangle other than the overall building shape, which has little effect on the internal use. every single picture screams monolith, which is the last word i would associate with movement. the pictures and environment tell me a story of grids, crowded with clusters of people. the design says "this will be a very noisy place, both audibly and visually". nothing in the design promotes movement or separation or any concept really.

and ive always seems to childishly defend his designs, where he basically responds with "you just don't understand". and i like how the article states mastermind in the title yet gives very concrete examples to the contrary in the form of employee complaints and concerns. what was masterminded, exactly?

ive's design aesthetic is based upon gray, white, glass, rectangles. and nothing else. what an artistic snooze fest, even ignoring the actual usefulness of his designs.

theoh• 9 years ago

Ive has some kind of charisma that makes his designs convincing. It's notable that everyone mentioned in that WSJ article (Bono, Foster, Serota) is a charismatic, persuasive leader. Ive's work is competent, in the tradition of Dieter Rams, not a snoozefest but part of a long tradition of rejecting shallow styling (the major culprit in the eyes of those designers, eg at HfG Ulm, was the exaggerated forms of auto design of 50s America)

Apple design makes sense if you see it as a cultural practice embedded in competing traditions of design (analogous to punk vs prog rock vs ...). Jobs himself placed great importance on developing his own charisma, a compelling personal vision. The fact that it's largely a functional vision conceals the seductive ideology behind it.

If you look at Swiss graphic design, like Josef Muller-Brockmann's work, it's often just sans-serif type in a grid layout on a white background. That can be interesting once you tune in to it. This probably sounds patronizing but I mean to say minimalism can be just as interesting and subtle as maximalism. Splashy, garish expression is not a long-term solution to the "snoozefest" problem.

Having said all that, sometimes minimalism is just a way of being chic (like an art gallery) rather than vulgar (like a muscle car). I'm definitely not saying it's better, but the superficially dull ingredients (straight lines, gray, rectangles) are not the deciding factor. Apple HQ may be a meretricious display of precision and expensive design independently of the superficial appearance.

77ko• 9 years ago

As an Apple customer, I get the impression that Ive and his design teams time is better spent designing products rather than this building.

Sure, spend billions in it, they have the money, but this article and others suggest people from Apple spent a LOT of time on the building at every stage instead of mostly leaving it up to building professionals like most other buildings are done.

eternalban• 9 years ago

I didn't get to read the article but wonder about the "Mastermind" notion. Norman Foster is not exactly a push over architect. Was the claim that Foster + Partners had nothing to do with this design?

A delicious aspect of this design is how closely it resembles the English spook central:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/GCHQ-aer...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-V4KSNOGfDN0/UTnFgqoi24I/AAAAAAAAAe...

Let's hope form is not following function here ;)

dbbk2• 9 years ago

So I just subscribed to WSJ online to read this article. Went to cancel my subscription before it renews for next month. There's no option to cancel! You have to call a US phone number. I'm from the UK. This should not be a thing in 2017.

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

you can search for the article name on facebook and get free access to it.

dbbk2• 9 years ago

Didn't know this. I'm happy to pay though, it was only £1, but making it as hard as possible to cancel is just insulting.

MiddleEndian• 9 years ago

This should be illegal in my opinion. There should be a way to send a "cancel" signal to credit card subscriptions from your bank and continued billing should be considered theft.

thinbeige• 9 years ago

I am surprised by this article. Jony Ive hasn't appeared in any of the last keynotes. He was just a faceless voice-over on some of the announcements videos.

There is a notion that he spends more time with his family in the UK than at Apple. Seems like he retreated and I am not sure how big his inpact really is. He definitely had more influence on that project at the beginning.

Even if he is still involved with Apple, I, as a customer, couldn't care less about Apple's Disneyland (which is also about a different skill set, the one of architects and not CE industrial designers). I'd rather like to see Jony Ive working on the core of Apple and not its facility management, e.g. the Mac series, Mac Pros, native Apple displays, macOS' aging UX/window management, heck there's still plenty of work in the iOS/iPhone department.

joshfraser• 9 years ago

maybe the reason Apple products have been such crap lately? they've been too busy obsessing over their shiny new building.

How Jony Ive Masterminded Apple’s New Headquarters

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