di Luca Vandini

The apple is a symbolic figure that has always been associated in our culture to something revolutionary and to something with high cultural relevance. Adam and Eve left Eden garden only because the taste of the apple. Eris, the ancient Greek goddess of strife, choose an apple, made of gold, to symbolize the maximum of the beauty. Without an apple and its fall, down the tree to the head of Isaac Newton, we would not have understood one of the most influential factors of life on earth, the gravity force. Concretely, an apple is an all-content fruit, in the way it has very small seeds and a very papery skin with an almost golden colour that makes it a regal food. So the most of it is the flesh, its substance. For this reason it has always been adopted to represent a thing with a strong and innovative content, a substantial and significant factor.

Steve Jobs who has always had a particular feeling for icons and symbolic language, understood the metaphoric power of the “apple” and after a initial old-fashion typographic logo (who no one remembers nowadays) chose this fruit to represent and to name the substance of his technological revolution. The bit apple that for a long time was shared with another revolutionary phenomenon, The Beatles and their record label, became the synonyms of a new way in which technology enters in our life. In years The Apple Computer seemed able to confirm for a long time the destiny of being revolutionary and innovative embedded in its fruit logo.

But something changed…

After the launch of many devices that have changed significantly our life, as sometimes it happens, after a revolutionary moment follows a more conservative phase. As his last big project, Jobs wanted to leave to Apple Computer a new house through which consolidate and celebrate its bigness. With the celebration of the architect Norman Foster, Jobs and Apple performed their eternal marriage with a 2.8 mln squared feet ring that will host the future of the technology corporate in a closed community lost in a new Cupertino woodscape. The ring, who looks like very much the circular trackpad of iPod models, seems to have substituted the apple logo in symbolizing the attitude of the corporation. A ring is the concrete symbol of an agreement, is something that sanctions and wraps secrets and wills. And it has nothing to do with radical changing and pioneering. A ring encloses a pact, or a corporate wood in this case, without leaving the possibility to escape. So the apple has been completely voided; the substance disappears and what remains is only an envelope all around a void. This ring does not try to find revolutionary solutions to contemporary urban problems like car dependence or suburbs expansion.

This symbolic shift, rather than promoting innovation and radical reaction, declares Jobs’ intention to protect and consolidate Apple Computer, closed in ring spaceship, isolated from Cupertino, from the world and even, in the last, from its creator.

Milano, 21 march 2012