Foster + Partners has designed a new Apple Store for Chicago, an "ambitious design" with huge glass walls and a slender roof.
The Apple Michigan Avenue store is located on the city's river edge beside the North Michigan Avenue, an area also known as the Magnificent Mile, and in front of the higher-level Pioneer Court, a public plaza.

Foster + Partners designed  a pavilion that looks like a scaled-up version of the company's laptop computer. The project placed a pair of granite staircases either side of the store to create a new pathway from the plaza to the river esplanade, while the huge glass walls rise, of approximately 10 metres, to maintain views of urban south side of river.

Notes by Foster+Partners.-

• The store features an extremely thin Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) roof profile (3’-4” max depth over 110’-8” span)
• 10’ to 17’ long roof overhang on all four sides for solar protection and open views
• Brushed stainless steel structural columns (no joints or seams)
• 4 layers of ½” thick laminated ultra-low-iron glass façade

Description of project by Foster+Partners

Inspired by the pulse of Chicago’s artistic energy, Apple has created a new platform for performance in a city charged by music. Located at the intersection of the Chicago River and North Michigan Avenue’s ‘Magnificent Mile’, Apple Michigan Avenue cascades down from Pioneer Court to the river’s edge, creating new connections between the city and the river.

The project reflects Apple’s commitment to the cities and communities it inhabits, and is the result of a close collaboration between the design team at Apple led by chief design officer, Sir Jonathan Ive and Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president of Retail and Online Stores and Foster + Partners.
 

Sir Jonathan Ive said, “Apple Michigan Avenue is about removing boundaries between inside and outside, reviving important urban connections within the city. It unites a historic city plaza that had been cut off from the water, giving Chicago a dynamic new arena that flows effortlessly down to the river.”


Pioneer Court is an urban plaza steeped in Chicago history. It is the spot where Point de Sable – the founding father of Chicago – first lived and worked. Apple Michigan Avenue sits atop a wide new public stair, created to lead down from the plaza to the river. The gentle descent of levels creates active spaces where people can connect, create, and experience the city and river together.

The stairway transitions seamlessly between the outside and inside. It passes through the building’s walls – dematerialized to pure glass – and connects to the store’s buzzing center, sheltered by an impossibly thin carbon fiber roof, supported on slender stainless-steel columns. As the interior steps down to the river, it acts as a seating space around the Forum – the hub of Today at Apple and a live source of creativity, education and entertainment.

More information

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Architects
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Foster + Partners
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Area
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20,000.0 m²
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Venue
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401 Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States
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Project Year.- 2017
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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

Read more
Published on: October 27, 2017
Cite: "Reconnecting Chicago to its river. Apple Store Michigan Avenue, Chicago by Foster + Partners " METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/reconnecting-chicago-its-river-apple-store-michigan-avenue-chicago-foster-partners> ISSN 1139-6415
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