Design: Apple of Our Eyes

The new Uptown Apple store dazzles in its simplicity.

Image credit: Marshall Franklin Long

By: Phillip Koski |   August 2010   |  From the print edition

With the recent launch of the iPad, a clear design direction has emerged with Apple’s expanding line of handheld electronics, especially with the iPhone 4 and iPodTouch. Each of these products sports a meticulously machined housing of satin-finished stainless steel. On the front, a crystal clear sheet of frameless glass uses cutting-edge technology to achieve unprecedented clarity. And behind the glass, users encounter an open and easily navigated environment where they can find what they want intuitively and quickly. Expand these characteristics to the scale of a building, and they just as easily describe the design of the recently launched Apple store on Hennepin Avenue in Uptown Minneapolis.

Opened this past June, the Uptown Apple store brings another new face to the ever-changing lineup of mercantile ventures stretching from Lake to 31st Streets. Local Developer of the property, Jeff Herman of Urban Anthology, suffered a lot of grief for acquiring and tearing down the Uptown Bar. While plenty of people are still stinging from the loss of that bar’s Friday-night band scene and Saturday morning scrambled eggs and hash, no one is hand-wringing over the loss of the building. Thankfully, what rose in its place is a refreshingly crisp modern piece of storefront architecture that makes for some striking contrasts with its neighbors—a sedate brick-and-glass Columbia Sportswear store to one side, and the historic and ornately encrusted Suburban Theater on the other.

In keeping with Apple’s insatiable greed for brand orthodoxy, the new Uptown store abides by a strict set of building standards that control everything from materials to signage to furniture. Such standards aren’t unusual in the world of retail (as those of us living in the land of 10,000 Target bulls-eyes can attest), but with Apple, branding and design go beyond marketing strategy to become a kind of religion. 

And if design is religion at Apple, then surely its co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, is both prophet and high priest. Permanently attired in blue jeans and a black pullover shirt, Jobs’s ethos of simplicity and control permeates Apple’s culture, resulting in a pared down minimalism that impacts everything from the advertising (two guys talking on a white sound stage), accessories (the new, button-free Magic Mouse), packaging (just white boxes, please) and a retail store without cash registers or check-out lines (purchases are transacted by a roving sales staff, each toting a hand-held scanner/card-swiper/signature pad).

The Apple Uptown store design, predictably, is equally simple. From a customer standpoint, it’s little more than a large, tall room. A floor-to-ceiling glass wall with a double pair of doors looks out to the street, the entry sheltered from rain by a broad, thin awning of stainless steel. Accessories and software are displayed on recessed shelves in sidewalls, while the back wall is fronted by the long wood desk of the “Genius Bar”—a technical help desk stocked with super-smart Mac-ophiles. The ceiling is split by a skylight running down the center of the room, while the floor is tiled with super-sized square, grey porcelain. Aside from some chunky maple tables with lots of Apple computers and various iThingies spread out buffet-style, that’s about it.

As with any competent piece of minimalist design, what impresses is what you don’t see. Much of the ordinary brick-a-brac needed to support a contemporary building have been cleverly and painstakingly hidden away. Take the ceiling. In a conventional store you’d see a checkerboard of ventilation grills, sprinkler heads, light diffusers, track lighting, security cameras, speakers, exit signs and fire alarms. In an Apple store, all this visual noise is cleverly disguised within a banded series of taut, translucent membranes interspersed by stainless steel ribbons. 

The purpose of hiding all this engineering in the ceiling is driven by the same obsession Apple engineers take in secluding the messy functions of its devices, like antennae, batteries, computer chips and cooling fans. Why intrude on the users’ experience unless they gain anything by knowing about it? Simplicity, as Apple’s latest market capitalization numbers indicate, sells. As for the new Uptown Apple store, we’re simply impressed.