It seems Apple has taken transparency one step too far at its new Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino – with various employees already having sustained injuries after walking into glass walls.
Albert Salvador, a building inspector, apparently warned the company that this was going to happen – but his warning fell on deaf ears. Several employees have until now needed emergency medical treatment after colliding with ultra-transparent glass walls.
Salvador said: “When you clean the windows, you can’t even tell some of them are there.”
The full-length glass panels which constitute the biggest part of the building were designed to be so transparent that they would provide the illusion that the whole structure blends into the nearby forest. The doors have completely flat thresholds and are flush with the walls
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Around 13,000 workers moved into the newly built structure at the start of 2018 – and it did not take long before several of them became victims of the high-tech but almost transparent design. These incidents often resulted in calls to emergency services.
A transcript of one of these calls read: “We had an individual who ran into a glass wall pane and they hit their head. They have a small cut on their head and they are bleeding, slightly disoriented.”
Several other similar calls are on record – but luckily none of them required hospitalisation.
Unhappy employees have reportedly started marking doors with yellow sticky notes, but Apple had these notes removed because they ‘detracted from the building’s aesthetic.’
This comes after Steve Jobs proudly declared in 2011 that: “There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building.” At the time he added that Apple had “a shot at building the best office building in the world.”
According to California state building codes, doors have to be clearly identifiable, but Apple apparently interprets such mundane requirements loosely.