mmalc writing on X Machina:

Apple Park’s primary design goal was to foster collaboration and serendipitous interaction — almost the exact words Apple’s own head of industrial design used to describe the building years after it opened, and consistent with what Jobs pitched to Cupertino’s city council in 2011: a ring shape chosen specifically to eliminate hierarchical corners in favour of more egalitarian, encounter-friendly circulation. By most accounts from the people who actually work there, it’s failed at exactly that.

The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards away.

Ironically, Apple Park replaced a campus that did far better on the same measure without ever trying to. Infinite Loop produced far more of the accidental, cross-team contact Apple Park was explicitly built to create. Working out why starts with what Infinite Loop got right by accident. It continues with what the research on office proximity says about why that kind of thing happens at all. And it ends with what Apple Park could become instead — including a version of the fix Apple already trusts enough to run for a hundred people a year.

I have heard similar anecdotal frustrations shared by various Apple employees over the years. This is also not exclusive to Apple’s headquarters, as many open-plan offices face the same issues. I can’t say I am surprised that Jony Ive focused on how the building looks rather than how it needs to function.

The amount of detail that went into this piece is incredible, and definitely worth a read.