Architectural Centre

On a recent visit to New York, there were many things that caught my eye, but one store in particular appeared to be attracting a lot of attention. The Apple stores, crisply detailed completely out of glass, is quite a startling construction – architecture that almost isn’t there.

Yes, it is glass, but it is all low-iron glass, so there is almost none of that greenish tinge you get. The Apple store on 5th Avenue, the ‘flagship’ store, is a simple glass cube set in the otherwise fairly bland and empty forecourt of a corporate tower block, and is just that: an empty glass cube. There is nothing there – certainly not even a name – just a floating, glowing white Apple logo hovering above the entry. The cube sits over a crisp square hole cut into the forecourt, and inside the glass doors of the cube sits a glass stair, curling delectably around a glass elevator.

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