A Genius of the Storefront, Too

Angelika Warmuth/European Pressphoto Agency

Apple's glass-filled stores, like one in Hamburg, Germany, show Steve Jobs's touch.

Apple’s free-standing stores, many with soaring glass entrances and staircases, are a testament to the design notions of Steve Jobs.
WHEN the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. “Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again,” Mr. Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar’s headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all with design work by Mr. Bohlin and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — and Mr. Jobs himself.
“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
Just as Mr. Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.
“No one in commercial architecture has ever channeled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple,” said James Timberlake, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London. “Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”
The work of Mr. Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced — and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Mr. Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.
The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets in Manhattan, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Mr. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Mr. Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.
 In their years working together, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry.
Mr. Jobs was “a very public person,” Mr. Timberlake observed. “That’s in contrast to Peter. He’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson. He doesn’t sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it’s more like a fireside chat.”
A  TEAM led by Karl Backus at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson learned early on to approach Mr. Jobs with alternatives. “He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions,” recalled Mr. Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work. “We all enjoyed the collaboration.”
The notion of glass as Apple’s signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in its store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.
“We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down,” Mr. Bohlin said. “So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal.”
Just as Mr. Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Mr. Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.
“We got James O’Callaghan involved. He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Mr. Bohlin said. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.”
In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Mr. Bohlin said.
“This is the kind of detail Steve wanted,” he added. “We’ve been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”
Apple’s use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a pristine glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.

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