Norman Foster tries to explain Apple’s new headquarters

One can be a fan of Apple and an admirer of Lord Foster, the designer of Apple’s new Cupertino headquarters, and still believe that this building is a huge mistake in so many ways. I have called it anti-urban, anti-social, anti-environmental and probably anti-Apple. Now Norman Foster does an interview with Cathleen McGuigan of Architectural Record and it is just appalling how far he has to reach to justify this thing.

Spaceship Apple is freaking huge: A 2.8 million square-foot orb on a 176-acre parcel serving 12,000 employees in oh-so-suburban Cupertino. While talking to Architectural Record, architect Norman Foster defended the headquarter’s massive size and weird shape, and revealed some intriguing new details. With 12,000 employees on site, just think of it like a college, says Foster: “You could compare that with a typical university of the same size.” In fact, Steve Jobs was inspired by the Main Quad on the Stanford campus, and the scale of the building was modeled upon it. Except, instead of a dozen buildings arranged like a college (or the HP campus that existed), there will just be one big building.