That is Apple's corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Whatever architect conceived this monstrosity gets the wall
Exactly my thoughts. If this were a building from the USSR we would all be shooting ropes over it.
The archetect did nothing wrong
I found the USSR version
https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/bublik-circular-apartment-building-moscow-pinnacle-brutalism/
Yes! Thank you! I was trying to find that earlier to post in this thread but couldn’t. It looks really cool I’d love to know what’s it’s like to live in.
Absolutely, if it was a housing/community project instead of a corporate one, I would be a fan.
It's the gigantic O-shaped complex slapped in the middle of everything that some corporate engineer thought up, juxtaposed with the significantly more dense residential developments around it (which are clearly bougie themselves), that makes this image scream "late stage capitalism" to me.
Yeah, Walt - the capitalist old man he was - hated the urban sprawl of post-war america and of course, had a life-long fetish for the idealized version of Marceline and Kansas City where he spent his childhood. Building EPCOT was the only real reason he even decided to do Disney World - since there was a large amount of land up for sale in Central Florida -- more than enough to build your own town and then get the local government to give you near full jurisdiction over everything within its borders.
I think, if he had managed to live long enough to see it through - it probably would've been a short-lived community, especially since Walt wanted:
- Private companies like RCA and GE to have headquarters there and also employ a lot of the residents. On top of that, those companies would be constantly updating hardware/appliances/etc in the homes since Walt wanted the companies to literally use the residents to test their prototype products in their homes.
- Everyone would be employed. Walt's idea was that residents were to move out when they reached retirement age (or got fired/laid off, I guess).
- It to literally be contained within a climate controlled dome like some shit out of Biodome.
- There would be no local government/direct democracy/etc. Walt wanted to quite literally lord over a bunch of people until his lawyers were like "yeah no that's not gonna work".
And more I'm probably forgetting. The transportation system (having layers of peoplemovers/monorails underneath the city) is genuinely cool though and parts of it even survived past Walt's death (and his brother's smart business pivot towards focusing on the actual theme parks) in the form of the Utilidor system - nine acres of underground (technically they're ground-level, Disney just built the actual park atop them) tunnels that stretch through the Magic Kingdom (and some parts of Epcot) in WDW; which is how cast-members get into and around the park without being seen in costume, how trash is picked up and taken out of the park, and even how cash/food/etc deliveries and pick-ups from the stores inside the park are handled. A shame they didn't include the monorails for cast members to navigate around, instead of making them walk or ride golf-carts though.
EPCOT was always my favorite area of WDW as a kid, the couple of times we went on vacations there, because it really did seem like it was focused less on the "hey we know you're here to see our IPs, here's your $50 t-shirt thanks" and more on "humanity may achieve great things, if we work together". Spaceship Earth still gets me as an adult, the last time my parents forced us out there, even though you're still forced to walk the abysmal Siemens sponsor exhibit, which is a bunch of out-dated technology like a shit racing game. (Honestly bar Figment's Journey through Imagination, it's the ride that, if I ever do decide to spend an unfathomable amount of money to go back to DisneyWorld for whatever reason - I hope has gotten an update it deserves by then.)
Anyways, here's Walt himself talking about EPCOT . Also highly recommend Defunctland's episode on it (and really his entire channel) if you have 50 minutes to spare and want to hear a classic tale of Walt Disney not understanding his employees were people too.
You may now cancel me for spending 15 minutes on a reply about Walt Disney
I like the idea of it being a neighbourhood with a park in the middle, but I don't love the idea of having to jog around the circumference of a circle for 15 minutes to get form office A to office B.
I don’t hate the concept.
Tulou's are legit. sucks they don't really exist outside china yet
Yeah me too. Not sure what's supposed to be so bad about it. It reminds me of a space station
Obviously it looks super cool but I think OP is saying it's a waste of resources or land
I actually think that's a pretty dope building because of the green space in the middle
its a big circle so, meh... turn it into low income housing and suddenly that big park in the middle is a community space im a fan of
It just needs ramparts on the top in case the landlords come for a visit. I could imagine the inside of this thing looking like the fucking death star though.
I recall this is based on the iPhone home button which they promptly phased out shortly after finishing construction.
There is also a part where people put sticky notes to indicate doors, but they get removed because they distract from the building's design.
The doorways reportedly have perfectly flat thresholds because “if engineers had to adjust their gait when entering the building, they risked distraction from their work”, according to a construction manager talking to Reuters.
What the actual fuck. I'm sure the work culture there is very healthy and not soul-crushing at all.
I designed it. I walked into the board meeting drew a circle on the whiteboard, and another circle inside of the first circle, and then collected my $10M
Personally, i dont think we have enough circular buildings in america. theyre cool looking
Supposedly it was designed in a way to take advantage of aircurrents and reduce the need for air-conditioning. Which would be pretty cool if true, but I'm guessing it's mostly BS.
It's entirely full of glass walls and doors, too. Workers there, of course, started using these as impromptu whiteboards until management came down with a no sticky notes mandate. Apparently this injured so many people from walking into walls there is a "mandatory sticky note rule" ongoing in the building.
Sticky notes are unnecessary. Just write on the glass directly with a sharpie; it erases easily with solvents. Old lab trick.
They were doing that too. Thought I might have implied that with calling them impromptu whiteboards. Sticky notes are better for people with poorer vision though, from personal experience. I imagine that's why it's called a sticky note rule.
Lol who in their right mind runs a company full of software engineers and expects them not to use the glass walls as impromptu whiteboards?
on the one hand, circles are terrible for utilising space efficiently - on the other, it gives you an excuse to put parks and green spaces in the spaces left inside and out
Wait circle is basically the solution to the problem of getting the largest surface with the shortest curve...
In the context of packing circles together, you get wasted space in the gaps, whereas orthogonal shapes (squares, rectangles) are flush with no gaps
