Stefan Behling, a senior architect at Foster + Partners, is looking relaxed and happy as an animated group of press stream into the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York. The landmark venue – completely underground but for a glass cube entrance that sits at the top of Fifth Avenue, opposite where Central Park begins – has been closed for renovations since January 2017. During that time, Apple took over space nearby as a temporary store.
Apple Fifth Avenue is about to re-open.
Tomorrow morning at 8AM Eastern, the store re-opens on what promises to be quite a day. The new iPhones and Apple Watch go on sale then, and the store is already stocked with the new items.
Behling says the purpose for the store redesign is simple: “Does it make you feel good?” The new store, which is double the size of the old one, is quietly palatial without being daunting. You enter down a spiral staircase with 42 stainless steel treads cantilevered out of an impossibly shiny central column. As you go, you can see the entire store revealed as you turn in each direction. There are mirrors which mean you can see yourself, customers walking the floor below and, no wait, that was a reflection, the people are over there or… It takes a little getting used to.
Then, when you reach the bottom of the staircase you glance up. You’re surrounded by the Apple Store but there, through the glass cube above, the Manhattan skyscrapers are visible, connecting you to the outside world.
Inside the new Apple Fifth Avenue Store.
The new store is huge, spacious and yet still human. Apple’s trademark tables, though twice the normal length in this store, display the latest iPhones, iPads and everything else. There are trees making up the Genius area, and a demonstration area where you can, for instance, hear a HomePod or two.
But it’s underground, so the lighting is crucial. It must either be dim or oppressively bright, right? In fact, the lighting is one of the subtlest and most beautiful things in the store.
There are 80 circular light lenses in the ground, 62 flush with the Fifth Avenue floor, 18 raised up as places where people can sit. Natural light floods through to the store below.
This is a 24-hour store, though, the only Apple Store open round the clock. So, what happens as the light changes?
Apple Store Fifth Avenue
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. That’s because as the light outdoors changes, the LEDs respond, gently increasing output when the weather changes and the light dims. And you know what they say about New York: “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”
If 80 rings of LEDs don’t sound like enough, there’s more. The fabric that makes up the ceiling is semi-translucent. It isn’t flat, but swoops up and down, reaching as high as possible to the LED rings, almost like a cloud.
Behling explains, “Nobody in the world has ever done a ceiling like this. It does a happy white cloud thing but the entire ceiling is actually a light fitting. 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.”
Behling is keen to stress that Foster + Partners have worked hand in glove with Apple and that Jony Ive was 100% involved in the design. He may have left Apple but creating the store has taken years, so his imprint is everywhere. Behling says, “It’s a partnership, a collaboration. Everyone is one gang. You can see sketch books and it’s Jony sketching the curves, such as on the staircase, and it’s all Bézier curves.” These are the kind of curves Ive loves, they are even used in the corners of Apple’s app icons. So if you wanted to,” Behling adds, “you know, if you wanted to, you could see a relationship between the building and the products but not in a, hopefully not, in a banal way. The store doesn’t actually look like an iPhone.”
There are plenty of cute details – no surprise from Apple. Outside there are trees and benches on the plaza, a water feature like an urban stream, lit so it’s visible at night. The circular elevator has a glass ceiling so you can see the sky outside and the Apple logo floating above you. Here’s what it looks like when you’re making the journey up from the store to the street above.
Oh, and you see that wall where the AirPods are? The notes on the wall are made up of little AirPods – cute, huh?
Even more subtle: those are not random notes, but the actual music for the original Think Different campaign. Seriously: only Apple.
I’ll give the last word to Stefan Behling.
“If you really boil it all down, it's all about, what do you feel like? There are very few places that are much nicer inside than it is being outside in Central Park under the trees, with dappled light. So, the whole idea here is, could you actually make the space feel as good as being outside? Like happy white clouds, going through the blue sky, and it feels happy and fresh.”
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