IN THE LOOP Jony Ive on Apple’s new HQ and the disappearing iPhone Anticipation was higher than usual and it always runs to feverish ~ when the press and other interested parties made their way to California's Silicon Valley last September for the latest Apple keynote presentation. The most titanic of the valley's tech titans was due to unveil its most significant update to the iPhone since its launch, ten years previous. In that time the iPhone has upended industries and transformed how we do just about everything. The update was a big deal. But most of the golden ticket holders were as excited about where they were as what they were about to see. This was the first up-close mass sighting of the most talked-about new building the world, a Ssbn, ot soit’ said, Foster + Partners designed loop of glass, ‘aluminium, limestone and concrete and Apple's new HQ. Guests worked their ‘way up an artificial hill, part of 175 acres of undulating new landscape where once was dead-flat parking facility and dull corporate sheds, most of it owned by Hewlett-Packard. This engineered topography, a fantasy of California, gentle ‘and abundant, was borne of the earth removed to make way for the new building's earthquake-proof foundations, and has been planted with 9,000 trees, including cherry, apricot, apple, persimmon and pear. All chose trees, as was the intention, mean that che 2.8 million sq fe new building never fully reveal itself. You see only sections and its giant curve is never apparent. Nor, given the elevation, are two ofits four storeys. Drones have buzzed over this site during much ofits construction, and of course there were renders, Still, nothing prepares you for its audacious mass. Or its scifi drama. It is, as was promised, a giant starship landed in Cupertino. The keynote is taking place in the new Steve Jobs Theater, itselfa small marvel ‘of engineering, ingenuity and attention to detail. ‘Ifthe overall project isa small town, then thisis the town hall, and jewel; says Stefan Bebling, a Foster + Partners partner and one of the lead architects on Apple Pars. Above ground, the theatre is essentially a 16sft-diameter glass rotunda with no visible support. “In the beginning there was just ths idea: “Let's have a hovering roof”, just this sliver of roof floating in the landscape says Behling, ‘And it has been the most difficult building of my carees? Annecwork of 44 conduits, carrying electricity, data and sprinkler systems, is housed in three-quarter inch strips of aluminium in-between the theatre's glass surrounds. The carbon-fibre roof, rested, built and unbuilt in Dubai, was made the same way you make the hulls of racing yachts and weighs just 80 tons. ‘This isthe first time in the history of mankind that this has been done; says Behling. It’s the biggest carbon-fibre roof of its kind in the world Ifyou are serious about achieving something like this, and making it look effortless, you have to go all ‘out. And thar does mean doing something that has never been done before? Behiing’s excitement and pride in the theatre and its big brother are palpable ‘and genuine. But he is quick vo acknowledge that at every stage this was a collaborative project. Everything in this theatre, every detail, everything you see around you, i totally integrated collaboration with Jony Ive Apple's chief design officer] and his design studio. Over the last nine years, we have become almost one. We talk together all the time, sit and sketch. This is not a Foster + Partners building? From the open space above ground, you descend to the auditorium on a curving limestone staircase with a carved, recessed handrail on one side and a gently angular stone slab on the other. This whole space should feel carved and itis a ‘carved handrail in a carved space’ Behling says. (Something like the recessed handrail appears inthe redesign of Apple's Regent Street store in London, and Behling says that other ideas and details from the theatre and main building are filtering out into more Foster + Partners-designed Apple flagship stores) The 1,000-seat auditorium itself boasts Poltrona Frau light-tan leather chairs, curved. ‘wooden floorboards and as much space behind stage as in front of i. It isbuilt to display whatever Apple throws at it in the Future. And that will be worked out in the new infinite loop down the hill. A couple of weeks later, the press are gone and the main building, dubbed The Ring, is still the hub of a huge construction effort, though workiis now definitely ‘on finishing touches. The building is essentially a 50 to 60 storey tower tipped on its side and twisted into a circle, But the tipping and twisting are everything. What you are lefe with is four storeys of horizontal flow. The Ring is also less than 200ft deep, which means what might look looming and ominous from the ‘outside is full of natural light on the inside and spirt-liftingly open to its surroundings. The building will house 2.000 employees in identical segments; it structurally repeats itself eight times as you move around it. And you can move around it along a three-quarter mile internal corridor on the inside edge of The Ring The 800, 4sft-tall panels of curved glass on the building's facade, made by German company Seele, mean it offers views of the park and the Santa Cruz mountains looking our and, as you look in, a 3o-acre courtyard that will feature ‘orchards and oak trees, a large pond, and pergolas for outside dining. The view of the building's inner rim also takes in the solar panelling on the roof, which will provide for 80 per cent ofthe building's energy needs. Those panels, along with a natural ventilation system which, except in extreme conditions, keeps the building somewhere comfortably berween 68 and 77°F, and other factors such as the use of recycled wood, mean the building has been certified LEED Platinum. [Ac times, the project pulled in 250 Foster + Partners architects, involving plenty of transatlantic travel and the set-up of a permanent outpost, working alongside 1ve's industrial design team. But ifthe details were worked out with Ive, the big ‘vision also belonged to Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs, who first met with Norman Foster in 2009 and was much consumed by Apple Park during the last two years of his life (he passed away in 200). That vision was of making work as much like a walk in the parkas possible. More pragmatically it was about bringing together a workforce housed in 100 separate buildings, chen choreographing levels of integration and collaboration, ‘The office space in The Ring is, within limits, configurable, Teams can choose if they wane to work in individual offices oF open spaces. Fach floor in each segment has a central area with an oak meeting table and glass whiteboards that ‘open to reveal huge TY screens. More random interaction is intended and ‘engineered to happen in the circling corridor and on the staircases (there are 32 in the building and they are a particular point of pride for lve and the Foster + Partners architects) Each segment also houses a central atrium. The true hub of the building, though, isthe café, with seating for 4,000 and one the biggest kitchens in the US. At the outside edge two 85x s4ft moveable glass doors are designed to open the space up to the Bay Area's natural benevolence. The new Cupertino HQis, ultimate Apple product in some ways, the [A day later, Apple's design chiefisin a suite in the Carlyle hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, che most un-Appley of places, all white-gloved lift operators and early 20th-century swank. Now 50, ve is physically imposing but soft- spoken and as warm and likeable as his reputation suggests. He is, by his own admission, giddily excited about the new building and its possibilities. And those carefully framed views, He s also understandably sensitive about carping from certain quarters that che building is already outmoded, a single, inflexible, fixed lk, when the Future is all about transparent, reconfigurable campuses: buildings abe co adape and ‘change, and more open to their surroundings and the community they sitin (see ‘Exank Gehy’s HQ for Facebook, Google's in-the-works collaboration with ‘Biatke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, and Amazon's urban campus in Seattle). For Ive, Apple Park's flexibility isbuile in and it doesn't have to make 2 show of ic.‘Idont chink iis necessary tobe explicit about is flexibility’ he says, bur that flexibility is absolutely as powerful asin buildings where the primary story, is “Hey, you can reconfigure this”, Our building is very configurable and you can. very quickly create large open spaces or you can configure lots of smaller private offices. The building will change and it will evolve. And I'm sure in 20 years’ time ‘we wil be designing and developing very different products, and just that alone will drive the campus to evolve and change. And actually, 'm much moze interested in being able co see the landscape, that isa much more important capability. ‘The building will evolve. Actually, I’m more interested in being able to see the landscape, that is a more important capability’ — Jony Ive Where Infinite Loop, Apple's previous home, isa sprawl of separate buildings, ‘The Ring isa unified whole. And it would be easy to sce this new closed loop as Apple's culture of secrecy made physical. It’ a culture that Ive is quick to defend. ‘There isno ‘moon shot’ division at Apple, publicly declaring its ambitions to cure cancer or establish a new Eden on Mars"The way that we work is quietly? Ive says, We are conspicuously different in that and i is an important part of who we are? ‘And criticism of he building's hunkering insularity seems to misunderstand ‘hat itis there todo. Ic isa building about process. And Ive is clear that for his design studio as forall Apple employees, i will mean a new way of working, "That's one of the chings that Iam absurdly excited about. At the moment, there are a number of physically really disconnected design studios, and now we can share the same studio. We can have industrial designers sat next to a font designer, sat next to a sound designer, who is at next to a motion graphics expert, who is sat next to colour designer, who is sat next co somebody who is developing objects in soft materials. And adjacent to every set of closed offices, there isa very large open area of collaboration. It’s not just a corridor; these are large spaces that are repeated all the way around the building? TThe Ring is also a building that constantly reminds you that you are in a connected space, flat and flowing. ‘We have managed to keep it to four storeys and you very much have a sense of space and a relationship with the buile structure, That is one of the reasons we have spent so much time on the stairs. ‘There are so many connections between the floors. There are the light wells that goall the way down. You have visual connections to the floors and connections by the stairs? ‘The building, though, is not a metaphor for open systems, or creative flow made concrete. It is a made object. Apple's success has been built on higher-order industrialisation; not just designing beautiful objects that do all manner of new things but producing them in incredible numbers and at consistent quality. Its new building is, in some ways, che ultimate Apple product, in places using the same materials the company uses in its laptops and phones. Ie, above all else, isa maker, thrilled to have his CNC milling machines close at hand. This culeure of making was ar the heart of what Behling calls the ‘hybrid studio’ forged by the Apple and Foster + Partners teams. ‘One ofthe connections that we made very quickly was that their approach to problem solving was uncannily similar to ours’ Ive says. ‘We both make lots and lots of models and prototypes. We made full-size prototypes of parts ofthe building, we made prototypes to examine and explore a material. The protoryping took many forms? Buc if Ive isa maker and industrial designer in the classic mould - in love with imaterialising a particular curve, the tactility ofa particular stone or brushed aluminium, the correct weight and balance of an object in your hand ~he is also the man most responsible for making our new most essential objects all but disappear. ‘As a design team our goal has been, in some ways, to get design out of, the way. We try to define solution that seems so inevitable that it does recede? ‘The most advanced iteration of the iPhone, the X, launched with great hoopla at the keynote address, is all sereen, Except that’s the wrong way to look at it. The points chat, a least in the way we use it and understand it, i is entirely unfixed and fluid. I wonder, then, if Ive misses the physical click and scroll ofthe first iPods, that fixed mono-functionality, che obvious working parts the elegance of the design solution, But I've got him all wrong, ‘I've always been fascinated by these products that are more general purpose. What I chink is remarkable about the iPhone X is that its functionality is so determined by software. And because of the fluid nature of sofware, this product is going to change and evolve. In 12 ‘months’ time, this object will be able to do things that it can’t now. I think that is extraordinary. I think we will look back on it and see itas avery significant point in terms of the products we have been developing ‘As a design team, our goal has been to get design out of the way’ - Jony Ive ‘So while I'm completely seduced by the coherence and simplicity and how easy itis to comprehend something like the first iPod, Iam quite honestly more fascinated and intrigued by an object that changes its function profoundly and evolves. That is are. That didn't happen 50 years ago’ People say all kinds of things about the iPhone (though other Apple products have done things indistinguishable from magic) to borrow from Arthur C Clarke; as a mobile content vault, the iPad still feels more fundamentally xculous and life-enhancing, the MacBook is rally the tool of the creative professional, and the Apple Watch will gradually move further towards centre stage and embed itself in our behaviour), But the thing that has made the iPhone the absolute game- ‘missed at its launch, including Blackberry, much to its cost, Multi-touch technology meant that a single object could be a million different things at the anger is its multi-touch screen ~ it’s a point that many “Ifyou think of what multi-touch afforded, on the one hand it was so powerfully intuitive, because you could directly manipulate content; says Ive. ‘But because it wasn’e effected by physical buttons, you could create an interface that was very specific to an application. That's why the App Store could be and you could have such an extraordinary range of applications and user interfaces? Constantly under pressure to pull another iPhone-sized rabbit out of the hat, Apple now seems to be betting big on augmented reality asthe shiny new toy for developers and consumers. So Ive is now designing products that not only have litle in terms of fixed functionality, but chat will simply be the platform for outsized, outside-the-box experiences and educations. The physical thing will be left behind. They seem like difficult times for a product designer, but for lve, everything has been leading to this point. "Lemember being at college; there was this new development and a new set of challenges for designers, realy starting with the launch of the Mac in 1984. The fundamental function of an object could change in seconds and the orthodoxy around expressing function or having the physical object defined by its function wasn't relevant any more. To me this was extraordinary! [Now Ive and his team have to work out where that challenge takes them next. “We area fairly tenacious group of designers who are absurdly curious and constantly looking fr alternatives. Some of them we can understand right here, right now. Some of them are beyond the technology of the moment. They exist asideas, they exist to galvanise the development of technology. And some will bear fruit and others won't! In cruth, there is little point speculating about what Apple will do next, or whether it will finally silence those who insist ie needs to come up with another game-changing product. And less point asking Ive, | tried. Did the company lose something fundamental with the passing of Steve Jobs? Of course. And the completion of Apple Park at once memorialises Jobs and looks to embed the _most pasitive parts of his terrible ambition, making them corporate muscle ‘memory and learnt behaviour. Ive would be as fundamental a loss but he is sill there, at the heart of the machine, still building, still making, still learning. "When [look back over the last 25 years, in some ways what seems most precious {snot what we have made but how we have made it and what we have learned as a consequence of that, he says ‘always think that there are two products atthe end of a programme; there isthe physical product or che service, the thing that you have managed to make, and then there is all thae you have learned. The power of what you have learned enables you to do the next thing and it enables you to do the next ching better! Jony Ive’s limited-edition cover for Wallpaper* December 2017