The blocky, blond-wood display tables become the center of attention, with products set out as if exhibited in a museum. Everything about it seems as inevitable as the iPhone’s touch screen. With such attention to detail, the space feels stripped of artifice. The designers’ attention to detail is as immaculate and seamless as its client’s. And human window washers, not high-tech gizmos, will scrub the roof of pigeon defilements.) (To keep those stairs pristine, Apple replaces the glass treads when they show wear. Even the iconic spiral glass stair, a spectacular engineering feat all its own, barely registers at street level. The help desk, the shelves of accessories-anything even slightly messy-have all been banished to the basement. (Cash drawers concealed in display counters handle old-economy cash.) To all but banish untidy cashier counters, 30 or so red-T-shirted associates swarm the floor, each brandishing a checkout device built from an iPod Touch. Stone floor panels are perforated to supply air. The room feels as diaphanous as a bubble. Shadows move slowly across the uninterrupted expanses of marble. All that glass bathes the room in sunlight. Elegant trusses cross under, with tension cables picked out in machined stainless steel. He mounted fritted, insulating- glass panels on thin metal purlins that incorporate lighting, and (invisibly) sprinklers and security systems. The all-glass roof is an exercise in bravura minimalism, engineered by James O’Callaghan, of London-based Eckersley O’Callaghan. “That openness is the invitation,” Backus added. (It’s not a “flagship,” a word Apple people utter with contempt, since other companies don’t approach store design with the steely obsession of Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO and co-founder.) Johnson said that Apple will continue to make architectural investments in “landmark” locations where there is “enormous activity, lots of street life,” such as along the busy Upper West Side corridor that runs from Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center.Īccording to Karl Backus, the principal-in-charge at architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson who designed this and the two other significant Manhattan stores, Apple prefers to build one large selling room in order to “present the entire interior to the street.” The mullion-free glass walls ascend 40 feet high to meet the gently vaulted all-glass roof with an almost invisible joint. According to Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, these stores merit lavish outlays because “they are the most profitable.”Īt a press preview, Johnson described the Broadway location as one of the company’s “significant” stores. Because the store is that Manhattan rarity, a freestanding building, it is an even more alluring display of costly investment than the famous glass cube that tops the computer company’s underground store on Fifth Avenue. As retail reels in the recession and even established stores look like temporary pop-ups, Apple lavished expanses of Tennessee marble with end-matched vein patterns as soft as wisps of smoke.
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