The art of Apple architecture

Just as Steve Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

The work of architect Peter Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced - and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture of the Apple Store is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped. Jobs, who died in October, was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product's presentation and customer experience.

The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple's cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, 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. Bohlin's firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects' gold medal in 2010.

When Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Jobs, he wore a tie. "Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again," Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar's headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores around the globe, all designed by Bohlin and a team of architects from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson led by Karl Backus - and

The notion of glass as Apple's signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company's New York store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.

"We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down," Bohlin said. "So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal."

Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.

"We got James O'Callaghan involved. He's brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London," Bohlin said. "Now we're cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom."

In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. "You get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall." Bohlin said.

"This is the kind of detail Steve wanted," he added. "We've been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It's an interesting challenge, how to marry the two."

Apple's use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.

"We came to the conclusion it had to feel inevitable," Bohlin said. "The adjacent GM Building has a tall, narrow facade, and its best aspect is directly across from the Plaza Hotel. Everything in the area is rectangular. So we thought of a square of light. It looks easy, but it wasn't."

Customers started lining up 42 hours before the store opened, and lines have formed ever since, with crowd control often required. The building is being renovated. In keeping with Bohlin's and Jobs' quest to achieve more with less, a new cube will feature larger glass panes and fewer visible connecting elements.

Despite its popular and critical success, Bohlin and Apple have not simply repeated the glass cube in other cities.

The Apple store in Shanghai is a glass cylinder using huge seamless panels of curved glass. Like the cube on Fifth Avenue, it leads to a large underground space, but the area around it isn't rectilinear, and the most prominent local landmark, a towering television tower, is at an oblique angle to the shopping plaza.

"We had the idea of a circle," Bohlin said. "Steve said, ÔWhy isn't the entire plaza around the entrance a circle?' I said that was a great idea, but that's beyond our control. The plaza was already under construction. Somehow he got the developer to agree to redesign and redo it."

Both Apple Stores in Charlotte - at Northlake and SouthPark - are in malls and not freestanding structures. Still, their glass facades are striking.

For someone as fascinated - some would say obsessed - by design and architecture as Jobs, it's surprising that he lived in a relatively modest Tudor-style house in Palo Alto, Calif., built by a developer, and never lived in a house he helped to design. That might have changed had he lived longer. He and Bohlin had been at work for years on plans for a new house.

"It wasn't a very large house," Bohlin said. "We don't know if he thought we were finished. I remember when Steve first hired us, he said: ÔI hired you because you've done very good large buildings, and you've done great houses.' If you're doing houses, then you're thinking about the subtleties of a building.'"