A couple of weeks ago, on a cold Saturday, Michele and I went down to Wolf Road in Cupertino to buy some pu’er tea. As an aside, Cupertino is pretty famous for being the home of Apple but, what is less known is that it is the home to a large Chinese population. Starting in the late 70s, Chinese immigrants started settling in Cupertino, drawn by its excellent schools. Now it is a haven for good Chinese restaurants. End aside. The turnoff on 280 to Cupertino at Wolf Road has now been enlarged to two lanes to accommodate the increased traffic to the new Apple Park, but that doesn’t mean that just anybody can get into the main building. It is impossible to get close enough to even walk around the outside (and I don’t think I know anyone who can get me in).But, just from driving around, it is easy to see that the attention to detail is extraordinary. Look at the perimeter fence in the two lower pictures above, the pickets are steel tubes, close to ten feet high, cantilevered up from the ground. There is no top rail, each one stands on its own and has to be strong enough to stop a big guy if not a small car from getting through. They were probably prefabbed in a shop somewhere with cheap labor, but, still, that is an extraordinarily expensive fence.

A couple of weeks after the tea run, I went back to Wolf road to go to the Visitor Center to get a better look. The Visitor Center, as well as the main building,  was designed by  Foster + Partners, mostly Norman Foster, really, and it is exquisite. The design and the detailing, or lack of detailing, is perfect for Apple. It is a great monument to Apple, and that is the problem.  I love architecture but, unfortunately, when a company builds a monument to itself it usually means that its best days are behind it. When General Motors built its magnificent  Technical Center – designed by the great Eero Saarinen – in 1956, General Motors was the biggest, most profitable, company in the world with 51% of the total auto sales in the United States. When McLaren built its spectacular Technology Centre – designed by Foster, like the Apple Headquarters – in 2004, it had been the previous’ decade’s winningest Formula One Team, last year it was second to last only beating out a Swiss Team that is run, more or less, as a hobby. Maybe that is the good news, the world keeps moving, sliding into a veiled future. Apple, like Sony, and IBM before, that once imagined their way through that vail into that future and changed the world. Apple, like Sony, will still be a major technological and design force but their world-changing days are probably over and this is a monument to that wonderful past.