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Meticulous store meets meticulous architecture practice, with Apple’s commission for its signature store in San Francisco going to Foster + Partners. It is the practice’s first chance to show off its longstanding collaboration with Apple in the US, and the first retail outing for a new glass technology it has developed for the Apple campus nearby

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Words John King

Apple’s new ‘signature store’ in San Francisco isn’t simply the first of the computer giant’s new generation of retail flagships, a place where you can choose between more than 60 different iPhone cases - it’s also accessible proof that Foster + Partners has found the perfect client. An architecture firm known for its calibrated metallic poise is working for a $500bn-plus corporation with the same reputation, and the result is predictably sleek, with considerable effort and (undisclosed) expense having gone into making everything look effortless.

And just as Apple uses product launches to unveil technological updates to its high-tech tools, the grand two-storey cube serves as a display case for Foster + Partners’ structural prowess. Start with the facade facing the north-east corner of Union Square, San Francisco’s retail crossroads: it mainly consists of 10 sheets of glass 3m x 13m, each sheet consisting of four layers laminated together to form a 5cm-thick slab - so strong that no mullion is necessary to stiffen the resistance to gravity or the wind.

One of two staircases leads to the mezzanine floor in the otherwise single-storey store

‘A normal human couldn’t explain how this works,’ Foster partner Stefan Behling said in May, two days before the store opened to the public. ‘It’s the glass technology we’ve developed for the campus, and now we have a chance to use it in a store.’ The ‘campus’ referred to is Apple’s headquarters-to-be that should open next year 40 or so miles south in Cupertino. No mere office complex, it’s the much-publicised cross between a spaceship and a doughnut conceived by Norman Foster and now-deceased Apple maestro Steve Jobs.

Behling and partner-in-charge James McGrath are equally proud of the column-free, cantilevered second floor, a piano nobile-scaled mezzanine that narrows from 1.5m against the rear (structural) wall to 0.3m at the edge, sliced out at the top for maximum visual precision and intended to be what Behling described as ‘the most open floor you could ever imagine’. And the ceilings that could be elegant acoustic panels; in fact, each one consists of stretched fibreglass backed by webbing embedded with thousands of tiny LEDS to blur into a single smooth (controllable) glow and create what Behling calls ‘the softest light there is’.

Beneath the perfectionist sheen is a variation of the Apple Stores that can be found in 478 locations around the world. The frame is polished steel and the facades are glass, with thick oak tables inside where gadgets are displayed. But this is Foster + Partners’ first chance to show off its collaboration with Apple in the USA - not far from Silicon Valley, no less - and the signature store makes the most of its location.

The facade features two enormous sliding glass doors that open to provide a 12m-wide entrance

That facade facing Union Square began as a flat, featureless wall with one standard-sized door in the middle. After planners called for architectural gestures that would evoke the classicism found elsewhere in the district, the entrance was reconceived as two enormous pavement-to-ceiling sliding doors. When they part, the opening is a full 12m wide, with staircases on either side that lead to the mezzanine and, behind it, a tree-filled ‘genius grove’.

This tall single-storey space has Brobdingnagian sliding doors as well; they open on to a landscaped rectangular plaza designed by Foster + Partners to serve as the flagship’s public space. The narrow space is framed by steep structures, but includes one visually extravagant flourish - a green wall of creeping fig at the back that’s 20m tall and bisected by a narrow waterfall.

Foster + Partners has worked with Apple since 2009, and now appears to be the go-to firm when Apple wants a store to make a splash. For its part, the practice’s publicity apparatus is careful to bill the San Francisco flagship as a collaboration with Apple’s senior vice-president of retail and online stores, Angela Ahrendts, and legendary chief design officer Jonathan Ive. ‘Working with Jony is almost a dream come true,’ Behling says.

The meticulous firm has met its meticulous match, down to the debate over which of 15 different stitch patterns to use for the leather cushions that wrap around the trunks of the potted ficus trees in the genius grove. ‘We have arguments about everything, and mock-ups for everything!’

All images courtesy Apple