![]() In lesser hands, this design language could, at some point, easily have devolved into cliché. "It was a pretty startling thing to see a 32-foot glass cube," Backus recalls, adding that the cubes and stairs, with their emphasis on "tectonic craft," reflected Apple’s emphasis on "innovation and careful assembly." It was also the first to have a glass staircase, a feature that became, along with their design for the glass cube that first appeared in the Fifth Avenue store, an Apple icon. Spring Street-the first two-story Apple store-was where the architects began to use their signature gray Italian limestone floors and rectangular maple tables. The Soho location-in a neoclassical building formerly home to a post office-was the first of the company’s "high-profile" stores, according to Karl Backus, a principal in BCJ’s San Francisco office who has worked on all the firm’s Apple projects with Peter Bohlin, one of BCJ’s founders. Ever since the first freestanding Apple store opened on Spring Street in Manhattan in 2001, BCJ’s elegant-but-tactile modernism has been instrumental in building the Apple brand-in about 70 stores around the world to date. That’s where Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ) came in. ![]() Apple’s genius was to make state-of-the art products that were both beautiful and user-friendly, but it wasn’t necessarily easy to translate the company’s perfectionist aesthetic into an architectural vocabulary that was humane instead of chilly. Interestingly enough, given our obsession with designers as celebrities, as Apple rolled out store after store around the world, there was never much discussion of just who made this design magic happen. But it wasn’t just the seductive cool of the company’s products that won me over it was their stores, too-spaces and structures that matched the finely detailed minimalism of the products they showed, but that still felt comfortable and welcoming. After all, I’m a design geek, and my MacBook and iPhone-and even my now-ancient iPod-are things of beauty, lean and clean in their utter lack of extraneous elements. But when I finally got there, I was a goner. ![]() I was, I will admit, a latecomer to the cult of Apple.
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