In 2002, Apple Inc. opened its first non-mall retail store, in an old post office in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. The late Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times’ architecture critic, called the store’s design “fairly bland,” but certain Modernist-inspired elements stood out: white walls, metal trim, Lucite display tables, and slate floors. “This vocabulary,” Muschamp wrote, “shifts Apple from the realm of wow-zowie computer graphics and elevates the company’s wares to the level of Bauhaus archetypes. Marcel Breuer, meet Steve Jobs.”
Jobs, who died on October 5 at the age of 56, was no Bauhaus-trained designer, but he had an intuitive sense of the way people respond to good architecture, says Karl Backus, a principal in the San Francisco office of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, which has designed nearly all of Apple’s 350-plus stores (including the one in SoHo). “Steve knew that the best architecture comes from solving design problems in a very simple and straightforward way,” Backus says. “He was quite knowledgeable about architecture and design, and he would ask very pointed questions: Can we do this? Why not? And for the most part, his questions would take us into places we hadn’t considered before. For example, he would often ask, ‘Can we get the glass bigger? Can we reduce the number of fittings?’ It was always trying to get the design simpler and more to the point.”
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