Impermanent Monument for Intimate Machines: Apple’s Glass Cube

Glass as an architectural material has become fundamentally linked with Apple’s products and architecture, so much so that Apple refers metonymic-ally to their iPhone by its material: “It’s a piece of glass for Apple to deliver its exciting new software,” said a senior vice president of marketing.¹ In 2007, Apple launched its first iPhone with a monolithic glass touch screen, breaking away from the mechanical keyboards of smartphone competitors such as BlackBerry and Nokia. Through finger taps and swipes, the glass interface has shortened the distance between humans and machines; glass is the medium through which most intimate news secrets and images are exchanged. Apple’s emblematic application of glass extends beyond their products. From the Apple retail stores’ structural glass stairs, to the ultrathin, chemically strengthened Gorilla® Glass on the iPhone screen, the Apple brand is associated with high-strength glass in ways that defy the conventional association of fragility to glass. Apple’s architecture first deployed high-tech glass in 2002 at its New York flagship store in SoHo. It showcased all-glass stairs in which the treads and walls were laminated with hurricane- and bullet-resistant ionoplast interlayers. On the one hand, transparent glass is an ironic material choice for a company known for its culture of secrecy. On the other hand, glass is an apt symbolism for a company whose products are profoundly linked with the material. If aluminum was the material of the jet age, glass is the material of the information age, in which light signals are transmitted through pure glass strands about the diameter of human hair.

Apple has effectively ascribed glass’s symbolism of perfection to its products and architecture. In 1935, Le Corbusier writes that glass is imbued with a sense of perfection:

Glass that allows total light penetration, passing through without any distortion. Glass that, from inside the building, is as pure as a clear sky and that, from outside, provides distinct angles, a sense of flow, brilliance, and fluid movement. Glass that gives a sense of perfection. What a wonderful material to perfectly express part of the spirit of Modern Age!²

While this particular modern association with glass prevails, the material properties of glass architecture have transformed. In Le Corbusier’s time, glass could only be an infill for a window framed by steel, wood, or concrete. With the Apple cube, transparent glass serves as the structural walls and beams that let in light and view, thereby calling into question basic elements of architecture. Likewise, cultural meanings associated with transparent glass must also be reconsidered when questioning what constitutes monumentality in architecture.

Of Apple’s numerous transparent structures, the store on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue (Figure 6.1) draws attention to its striking all-glass cube. Designed by architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ), structural engineers Eckersley O’Callaghan

FIGURE 6.1 Apple’s glass cube, designed by architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, on the northeast corner plaza of 5th Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan. The cube serves as the vestibule to the retail store below.

Photograph: Peter Aaron (2006).

(EOC),³ and Steve Jobs and opened in 2006, the cube has attained the qualities of monumental architecture given its relatively small size and retail store function. It is the fifth most photographed landmark in New York City, surpassed only by the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Rockefeller Center, and Grand Central Station,⁴ all of which are — even though they too symbolize American commerce -generally more accepted as monuments than the computer retail store. Since the store’s opening in 2006, the glass cube has been ritualistically reconstructed three times, then ceremoniously revealed, as if it were the launch of a new Apple product. The process resembles the ritualistic replacement of a fully functional, two-year-old iPhone with a new version that is faster, smarter, and features commands that were previously unimaginable. Each version of the phone is highly anticipated and ceremoniously revealed to a massive audience.

This chapter explores the material and meaning in Apple’s glass cube, a monument made of an immaterial material that is at once both ephemeral and robust, transparent and conspicuous. These characteristics contradict conventional associations of monuments with permanent, opaque materials, such as stone and concrete. How does the glass cube embody the sometimes conflicting characteristics and qualities of an architectural monument? This chapter argues that glass is an appropriate material choice for a monument in the information age.