New Apple campus: A retro swan song from Steve Jobs

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The new Apple headquarters, planned for a site in Cupertino not far from the company’s current digs, looks plenty futuristic: It’s a sleek, four-story, ring-shaped building that Jobs himself, in an appearance before the Cupertino City Council, compared to a ‘spaceship.’

But buried beneath the otherworldly gleam of the building is a very old-fashioned approach to architecture -- and to city-building. The attitude of the campus toward the metropolitan region around it recalls quite clearly the suburban corporate estates of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

Read more about the campus, designed by London’s Foster + Partners, in my Critic’s Notebook.

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--Christopher Hawthorne