Looking at the drawing of Apple’s proposed new headquarters building (via Andrew Sullivan), I have seen the first case of Apple design that I really hate. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a fan of Apple design, sees a bad portent here:

When companies plan wildly ambitious, over-the-top headquarters, it is sometimes a sign of imperial hubris. A.T. & T. was broken up not too long after it moved into Johnson and Burgee’s famously grandiose “Chippendale skyscraper” on Madison Avenue. General Foods did not last too long after taking occupancy of the glass-and-metal palace Kevin Roche designed for it in Westchester County, and Union Carbide fell apart after it moved into another Roche building in Danbury, Connecticut. The New York Times Company’s stock price plummeted after it moved into its Renzo Piano building on Eighth Avenue, and they now lease the home they built for themselves.

Architecture isn’t in itself a cause of corporate decline—that notion is ridiculous—but overbearing buildings can sometimes be a symptom of companies losing touch with reality, and this problem will manifest itself in other ways. It’s said that Steve Jobs considers this building to be a key part of his legacy, which would be unfortunate, because it would mean that his last contribution to his company might well be his least meaningful.

When I saw the image, I thought, “It looks like a Cylon Donut.” Goldberger, unsurprisingly, far more aptly compares it to The Pentagon.

I have the same reaction to the so-called Freedom Tower being built on the World Trade Center footprint. (Remember all those people saying a few years ago that if we didn’t put an even taller building there, the terrorists will have won?) It’s even more true with these staggeringly tall erections Gulf Oil emirs are building in the desert, monuments to their own hubris. Insofar as conservatives buy into this nonsense, I’m reminded of what Jeff Hart, a grey eminence of National Review, once wrote:

It is depressing to hear cigar-smoking young conservatives wearing red suspenders take a reductive review of, well, everything. They seem to contemplate with equanimity a world without lions, tigers, elephants, whales. I am appalled at the philistinism that seems to smile at a future consisting of a global Hong Kong.

He was talking about a contemporary rightist attitude toward the natural world, but the sentiment also expresses itself in a thrust for architectural overreach. The refusal to recognize natural limits. The conviction that if we can, we must. Funny, though, how we all have a way of talking ourselves into thinking what we want is what we deserve, and what is necessary.

UPDATE: An old David Schaengold post observes that in any time and place, architecture expresses a culture’s “self-understanding.” What do the designs of these massive corporate cathedrals say about how we understand ourselves? What things do they tell us that, in Schaengold’s phrase, “tell you things about a culture that its members would rather not know”?