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Apple’s polished visitor center has a strange detachment

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The exterior of the Apple visitors center in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 27, 2017.
The exterior of the Apple visitors center in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 27, 2017.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle

The new Apple Park Visitor Center is Silicon Valley’s counterpart to Vatican City, the physical manifestation of a creed and a magnet for both the curious and devout.

That is, if faithful Catholics were allowed to glimpse Pope Francis’ dominion only from the rooftop of a refined gift shop across the street.

This is the carefully staged segregation that greets you in Cupertino, where Apple this month debuted the lone public piece of its 175-acre corporate compound. The surface details are dazzling, as often is the case with products from the brand that has made computer technology inseparable from daily life. But it’s also an oddly hollow temple where despite the air of immaculate perfection, not much is going on.

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The visitor center consists of three spacious rooms, one alongside the next, enclosed by a tall rectangular shell of ultra-clear glass. The roof is made of carbon fiber, a lightweight material more often used for airplane parts or artificial limbs, and there’s a shaded wood-decked terrace on top of that.

The architect for Apple Park is England’s Foster + Partners, which also designed the flagship Apple Store that opened last year on Union Square in San Francisco. It’s the ideal pairing of client and firm: Founder Norman Foster is known for a love of pristine futurism on par with that of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011 shortly after unveiling the proposed headquarters to the Cupertino City Council.

In its press release this month, Apple billed the visitor center as “a uniquely designed architectural extension of the new campus with similar aesthetics.” Foster + Partners emphasized that “several elements from the main building are replicated at the visitors center to give people a taste of the precision detailing at Apple Park.”

Visitors relax on the terrace at the Apple visitors center in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 27, 2017.
Visitors relax on the terrace at the Apple visitors center in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 27, 2017.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle

There was no visitor center in that initial plan, but I’m sure Jobs would appreciate such details as the gently curved corners of the glass shell. The roof above seems weightless as it cantilevers beyond the shell on all sides. The quartz that clads the two staircases to the roof is the perfect complement to the limestone that coats the structural walls within which the staircases rise.

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The limestone continues downstairs: The corridor that leads to the rest rooms has the solemnity of a catacomb.

Details like these are for architecture buffs. The day I visited, most people were up on the terrace, posing for souvenir photographs with the spaceship-like circular headquarters in the background, shrouded by trees. Or in the eastern third of the shell, waiting in line to gaze upon a model of the campus.

The reason for the line is that employees in red T-shirts hand out Apple Park-branded iPads that allow you to scan the tabletop. You see a lifelike image of how the campus will look when complete — the landscaping is still being installed and not all of the smaller buildings are done — and then any roof you focus on lifts up, revealing a three-dimensional diagram of what’s inside.

It’s the next best thing to being there!

Except that when you look past the exquisite minimalism of the visitor center’s architecture, here’s what is left: an Apple Store with a cafe at one end and an 11,000-pound metal slab on the other.

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Yes, the model is a thing of beauty. Yes, the store’s obligatory phones and tablets are accompanied by such exclusive Apple Park merchandise as $25 tote bags and $40 T-shirts. The cafe keeps things moving with a menu that consists of chocolate, nuts, energy drinks — and nothing else.

But this isn’t a visitor center where you can sign up to take a tour of the actual campus, because the public is not allowed inside. Nor are there relics from Apple’s 41-year history, like prototypes of the Apple II or television ads through the years.

And don’t look for information on how Apple Park and its central ring/spaceship/doughnut shape came to be. The campus is just there, an object to be contemplated either in idealized model form or via fragmented views up high.

Apple's problematic ParkSFChronicle

Basically, Foster + Partners has produced an exquisite architectural pavilion within a plaza of 114 dusty-green olive trees. Everything about the scene is intended to convey a message of technological and design mastery — to validate the beliefs of devotees and make the skeptics feel desire.

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If you really want to experience Apple Park, don’t just gape at the visitor center. Take a stroll down North Tantau Avenue.

You’ll see berms thickly planted with forest-scale redwoods, as well as smaller trees and shrubs. A gaping concrete portal allows delivery vehicles to descend into the spaceship’s bowels. Metal security bollards delineate the property line where needed.

It’s as plain as day: Apple Park is an enclave for a company that wants us to gape, but not get too close. We’re invited to buy its products, or ponder the shimmering aluminum model, but not to set foot within the sacred grounds.

This is Apple’s right — gated campuses are nothing new. What’s strange is to create a destination that’s little more than a tease, a vantage point from which to contemplate a sealed-off landscape for a hermetically sealed HQ.

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Even now, the panorama from the visitor center’s rooftop offers only partial views of the circular object at Apple Park’s core. As the trees fill in, we won’t be able to see even those.

But we’ll be able to buy an Apple Park T-shirt — and at a price that says we’re part of the cult.

Place is a weekly column by John King, The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron

Online extras

John King’s video visit to the Apple Park Visitor Center is at http://bit.ly/appleproblempark

For John King’s 2016 review of the Apple Store at Union Square, go to http://bit.ly/2im2Qmj

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John King is The Chronicle’s urban design critic and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who joined the staff in 1992. His new book is “Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities,” published by W.W. Norton.

He can be reached at jking@sfchronicle.com.