![]() ![]() Behling says, “It’s a partnership, a collaboration. He may have left Apple but creating the store has taken years, so his imprint is everywhere. So, behind the white material to make it just glow very subtly, there are thousands of LEDs, all of them follow the color of the daylight outside, all of it, not just the rings.”īehling is keen to stress that Foster + Partners have worked hand in glove with Apple and that Jony Ive was 100% involved in the design. It does a happy white cloud thing but the entire ceiling is actually a light fitting. It isn’t flat, but swoops up and down, reaching as high as possible to the LED rings, almost like a cloud.īehling explains, “Nobody in the world has ever done a ceiling like this. The fabric that makes up the ceiling is semi-translucent. ![]() If 80 rings of LEDs don’t sound like enough, there’s more. And you know what they say about New York: “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” That’s because as the light outdoors changes, the LEDs respond, gently increasing output when the weather changes and the light dims. Despite the roof coming in late, the project was delivered eight days early.There are rings of LEDs facing into the store, around the light lens, delivering diffused light that, if Behling has got it right, you will never notice. ![]() To install the roof, the team designed a suspension system that allowed the attachment without any tie off points. They team constructed a scaffold below to provide a working platform for the glass vendor, and then put up a rubber roof to keep the site dry. We had to come up with new ideas to keep the site dry-during one of the wettest summers in New York.” “Usually you have a roof when you’re putting up drywall. “Never in my career have I done something like that,” Taylor says. So when the glass for the roof was late (it came two months after original scheduled delivery, according to Taylor), the crew had to respond fast. Apple insisted on opening the store for Thanksgiving, in time for the 2009 retail season. The financial downturn in 2008 “put pressures” on both Apple and Shawmut, Taylor says. And as is common with Apple, secrecy was a top priority and the design had to stay under wraps.įortunately, Shawmut has built about 150 Apple stores to date, including the ones on Fifth Avenue and on 14th Street, and remodeled the one in SoHo, so the team was able to take care of most of the obstacles in pre-construction planning. ![]() To accommodate the in-and-out flow, the team scheduled trucks to the hour. The team had to excavate 5,000 cu yds of bedrock to demolish and renovate an existing two-story structure on Broadway and West 67th Street, as well as add temporary bracing, “with no room to move,” all while coordinating vendors to bring in massive structures such as the spiral steel and glass staircase and the glass roof. Working on a tight site in the middle of Manhattan complicated things further. The glass roof, which covers three-quarters of the store and measures 54 ft tall, 75 ft wide and 30 ft deep, consisted of glass panels weighing a total of almost 3 tons. Since the store has a glass roof, the mechanical system had to be hidden inside a three-story well. To begin with, the 25,000-sq-ft store’s power demands are quite substantial compared to a typical retail location, so the team had to install an advanced HVAC system to lower the energy draw. “They say they built the perfect computer,” he adds. “As a client, Apple is extremely demanding-they expect perfection, anything else will not be tolerated, whether the paperwork or the process of construction,” says Shawn Taylor, the project executive for lead contractor Shawmut Design and Construction. ![]()
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