Perhaps, however, the design gesture is working at a much larger scale, not in relation to any one nearby downtown but, as for all of Foster ’ s projects, as part of a higherstakes process of terraforming the Earth and building his own distributed portfolio of Earth bases (in many cases directly on behalf of The Stack ’ s expression). The shapes of things to come? What has already been said about the Apple Cloud Polis in the Cloud chapter is perhaps also seen here extruded into an architectural programming strategy: curated and closed off, affectively perfected, explicitly branded, secretive and opaque, totalizing and majestic, a theological rhetorical voice, etc. The utopia on offer to its OS Users is a slightly ecstatic platform that seems to transcend mere computation and operate more within a realm of ineffable experience. That the social contract of that experience would demand such secrecy, silence, restriction, and exclusivity is not necessarily unusual as political theologies go, but that it would be invested in branded equipment that connects Users to the Cloud layers of The Stack is an important novelty. In anticipation of the ultimate footprint and expression of the Apple Cloud platform into the City layer of The Stack, we also note that the integration of the closed megastructural platform model is now planned to include Foster ’ s refresh and redesign of Apple ’ s most public terrestrial presence, its hundreds of brand retail stores. That Foster ’ s office would become the house architect of the Apple platform ’ s human-facing earthly permeation suggests that his acumen with megastructures serves to organize the physical expression of the Apple Cloud Polis’ s City layer more generally. Apple has invested in the biological extravagance of the iconic megastructure in ways that the other platforms have not, including its resolute ambition to utopian totality. Certainly the data centers, warehouses, and logistics parks that give shape to Google, Amazon, and Facebook are no less geographic in scope, but they are not foregrounded as the face of the Cloud Polis in the same way. The incipient Cloud Polis of these other platforms does not rely on the ethics and aesthetics of total design closure with nearly the same intensity as Apple does. Google ’ s networks surely are megastructural in their scope and universality, but they do not observe the guardianship of interior borders as the essential principle and promise of User experience, whereas Apple ’ s do.
City Layer
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