“Last week, Google released an illustration of its next corporate campus, a complex of nine rectangular buildings, mostly adorned with green roofs, and all connected by a series of elevated walkways,” Ritchie King reports for Quartz.

“As it happens, Apple is also planning a new campus in Silicon Valley, and the design couldn’t be more different,” King reports. “It’s a single, circular structure that people have described as a doughnut or the touchwheel of an iPod and that Steve Jobs once likened to a spaceship. It’s simple and symmetrical, the roof is black (not green).”

MacDailyNews Note: Appels’ roof is covered with photovoltaic (solar) panels. That’s why it’s both black and “green” at the same time.

King reports, “Quartz spoke with an architecture professor and expert on workplace design, Brian Schermer of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, about the two buildings and what they represent.”

Some snippets of Schermer’s comments:

• Google’s business is somewhat sprawling and disheveled. They started off with search, and now they are getting into hardware, like Pixel and Google Glass. Similarly, their next campus is a thicket of ideas and places to be… The Google vision is perhaps to recruit people who are attracted to the serendipity of messiness.

• Apple’s is an architecture that [one] is meant to behold. The company is shooting for timeless beauty… Apple’s renderings are almost like an Andrew Wyeth painting, with the figure in the foreground, in the grass. There’s an aspiration to the Apple headquarters. It really is trying to be a work of art.

Apple's "Mothership" Campus (left), Google's campus (right)

Apple’s “Mothership” Campus (left), Google’s campus (right)

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Our Lady of Perpetual Beta needs to hire a real architect.

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