

Apple store manhattan architect how to#
The challenge facing the designers, at first, was how to create a storefront that would encourage passerbys to visit the underground retail location that “had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination.” Bohlin said.Īnother interesting example is how Apple’s now iconic glass cube structure at its fifth avenue location came about. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Mr. In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.” He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Mr. Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure. Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Mr. The solution was to create a glass stairway, an idea which Backus says Jobs loved right off the bat.Īnd from there, Apple’s retail obsession with glass only grew. One of the team’s challenges was creating a two-story store that would encourage visitors to visit both floors. In one example, the team was working with Apple on a two-story retail store in SoHo, a neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.ĭescribing what it was like working with Jobs, Karl Backus of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson said that Jobs would like to be presented with various options, after which he would make very useful and insightful suggestions. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Mr. The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets in Manhattan, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Mr. Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced - and expensive. Stewart describes how Jobs and the architecture firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson worked together to create elegantly designed retail stores that have won a number of architecture accolades throughout the years. Writing for the New York Times a few weeks back, James B. Indeed, Apple stores are frequently used as hangout spots where folks can stop in, look at new Apple products, surf the web, listen to some music, and hopefully, get some new hardware.Ī big part of that Apple store experience can be traced back to the architecture. Not only does it allow Apple to sell products without having to rely on third parties, it also allows Apple to mold the aura around Apple products by controlling the environment in which they are sold. In addition to having a hand in Apple’s complete product line, Jobs was also intimately involved in the design of Apple’s retail stores.Īpple’s retail strategy has been an integral cog in Apple’s resurgence. From the type of wood used in Apple retail stores to how a particular form factor should look, Jobs’ influence at Apple was all-encompassing and knew no bounds.Īll told, Jobs is listed as an inventor on 313 Apple patents and as the main inventor on 33 of them. A stickler for even the tiniest of details, Jobs personally oversaw nearly every aspect of everything Apple churned out. One would be hard pressed to find a CEO as actively involved with the minutiae of his/her company’s products as Steve Jobs was.
