“It’s called the edifice complex, and it carries a curse: A high-flying company builds a beautiful new headquarters, then heartbreakingly loses altitude,” Larry Light writes for CBS. “Some wonder if Apple, which is constructing a massive new palace near the tech titan’s long-time California office, is the latest to fall prey to this hex.”
“From Bank of America to Sears Holdings, history is littered with instances of corporate icons that built magnificent architecture to consecrate their glory, only to see fate humble them,” Light writes. “At this stage, to its many fans, Apple still enjoys an air of indomitability. Boasting the world’s second-largest market value, the company inspires enormous consumer enthusiasm. Its flagship iPhones amass annual sales that eclipse the individual GDP of 66 percent of the world’s nations. But the worry is that Steve Jobs’ juggernaut may have seen its best days. That without founder Jobs, who died in 2011, the company has lost its creative mojo.”
“Apple’s new headquarters is a worthy monument to its awe-inspiring scale and global reach. Designed by storied British architect Norman Foster, the building is a huge glass ring dubbed ‘the spaceship,'” Light writes. “The $5 billion project, located across the street from Apple’s current Cupertino, California, location, is 2.8 million square feet and a mile in circumference. It’s powered by a daunting array of solar panels. Housing 12,000 employees, the Apple-plex is slated to open later this year.”
“A theory called the Skyscraper Index, holds that massive new corporate buildings demonstrate that growth is peaking and woeful times are coming — for the organizations that built them, as well as the economy at large,” Light writes. “If so, that explains the Great Depression (the Empire State Building), the Asia Crisis (Malaysia’s Petronas Twin Towers) and the Great Recession (Dubai’s Burj Khalifa)… For sure, if Apple does succumb to the edifice complex curse, it will join a long roster of tech leaders that floundered following the ribbon cuttings.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The only curse Apple suffers from is the curse of pancreatic cancer.
It turns out that a visionary genius obsessed with user experience down to every last detail isn’t as easily replaced as some might have thought.
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