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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.

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Related teams tend to sit close to each other in any case, so this is a worst case scenario. Which isn’t really that bad anyways. It’s good exercise and a rectangular building holding 14,000 people would also require a lot of walking. Sure, it could be many, many rectangular buildings which everyone else does, which would require even more walking. Not to mentain there’s a huge benefit in productivity for 14,000 people to all get abundant natural sunlight, which is available to only a fraction of the people in a standard campus. Vitamin D is deficient in many people and engineers typically don’t get out much. I’d say it’s a win-win for everyone. Finally, the campus is pretty compact, leading to a ton of open space, which, combined with natural light, will likely lead to greater productivity and also be a great attraction to new employees who value the look and feel of their work environment very highly.

Look at Pentagon. Max of 7 minutes to walk between any two points in the building because of the design.

You might need to think more about what "efficient" actually means.

Apple did.

If you can move in a 2 dimensional plane, such as inside a regular building, you can go in a straight line between any two points.

If you're constricted to moving around the circumference of a circle, you necessarily have to go in a curved line.

Curved lines are longer than straight lines.

So the average distance between any two points is necessarily going to be longer in the Apple building than in a normal building with the same floor area.

Add to that, normal buildings have cores where the utilities are run in the center and radiate out to the edges. Running wiring, plumbing, and ductwork around a circle will involve miles of additional material that would otherwise be unnecessary.

I think maybe you and Apple have a definition of efficient that differs from the rest of the population.

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