Apple, today, still keeps critics away

“Amid all this was a workplace, too, four hundred acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. The sky above was spotless and blue.”—Dave Eggers, “The Circle” (2013)

If you grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1970s and ’80s, as I did, you felt a certain minor pride in sharing a home region with the Apple Computer Company, as the startup was known when it was founded, fifty years ago this week, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. I don’t remember Cisco possessing even a shred of cultural cachet. There was nothing cool about Sun Microsystems. But if your parents mentioned meeting somebody who worked for Apple, your ears perked up a little.

How galling, then, having gone on to become an architecture critic down the coast in Los Angeles, for me to have to spend several weeks ahead of the opening of the new Apple headquarters in Cupertino, in 2017, trading endless emails with the company’s PR staff—essentially auditioning for the chance to tour the building and write about it. In the end, despite fulsome promises to the contrary, the company, now called simply Apple, Inc., decided not to allow any architecture critics to visit the new building. A low-slung, ring-shaped design by Foster and Partners, it is located just off the 280 freeway, about 40 miles southeast of downtown San Francisco, and known as Apple Park.