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It’s almost a pity Apple Chief Steve Jobs went into the computer industry. He would have been a fantastic architect.
That’s because the hardest part of the job isn’t design — there are plenty of bold designs that will never make it past a blueprint. It’s convincing the world to let you actually build something.Bonus points if that something is a little crazy.
Jobs spent 10 minutes Tuesday night alternately flattering, obliquely threatening — and, ultimately — selling Cupertino, California’s city council on a scheme to replace a small chunk of the city with an enormous donut-shaped building that will house 12,000 Apple employees.
“It’s a pretty amazing building,” Jobs told the council of his plans for the building, which Apple hopes to complete by 2015. “It’s a little like spaceship landed.”
Mission accomplished. “Now that we’ve seen your plans the word spectacular would be an understatement, I think everybody is going to appreciate the most elegant headquarters in the U.S., at least that I’ve seen,” Councilman Orrin Mahoney gushed.
Jobs’ performance is a perfect counterpoint to the fictional speech architect Howard Roark gave in Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead.”
In the book, an uncompromising architect browbeats and blusters his way to an unlikely acquittal when put on trial for blowing up a building that compromised his original design.
Like Jobs, Roarke wants to “make a dent in the universe.” Unlike Jobs, Roark’s attempt to sell a jury on his plan is a defense that would only work in the world of fiction.
“His truth was his only motive, his work was his only goal,” Roark tells the courtroom. “Man cannot survive except through his mind, he comes on earth unarmed, his brain is his only weapon.”
Try that in front of your local zoning board when trying to put an extra bathroom on your two-story colonial and the men in white will come for you armed with a ketch-all pole and some tranquilizer darts.
Jobs shows a better way to, well, get your way: rather than compromise, he paints a picture.
“It’s curved all the way around,” Jobs says of the new campus. “As you know if you build things its not the cheapest way to build something, there’s not a single straight piece of glass in the entire building.”
He uses numbers: the new campus will have 350% more landscape, 60% more trees, 90% less surface parking. The processor inside will be 80% more powerful.
And Jobs makes it plain he has other options. He could move, but he wants to stay in Cupertino. He makes his listeners feel like they’re part of a plan to do something great.
“I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world, I really do think architecture students will come here to see this, it could be that good,” Jobs said.
Lastly, Jobs tells a story, reminiscing about the Cupertino apricot orchards he remembers from his youth — and later promising to plant a new orchard on Apple’s new campus. Every detail is telling.
“We want the whole place human scale,” Jobs said. “The overall feeling of the place is going to be a zillion times better than it is now, with all the asphalt.”
Feels a lot comfier than a place where your brain is your only weapon.
source: forbes.com
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