Andrew Hertzberg
That new Apple Store on Michigan Avenue is pretty chill. If you’ve walked by since Chicago got hit with a snowstorm, you may have noticed it’s a bit too chill.
Videos by Rare
A couple days ago, Rare wrote about the roofing design issues that weren’t the best equipped to handle the city’s weather. The store is meant to look like one of Apple’s products, but unfortunately a MacBook Air doesn’t come with gutters.
Further, the roof has a downward slope which means that anyone standing below could be hit with falling snow and ice. Apple has since closed off the surrounding areas and put up signs to signal the falling snow and ice.
The store was designed by longterm Apple architecture group London-based Foster + Partners. Ironically, the building is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Prairie Style of architecture.
Now Apple revealed the real reason for the dangerous situation and it wasn’t necessarily due to design: it was due to software.
“The roof has a warming system that’s built into it,” Apple spokesman Nick Leahy told the Chicago Tribune. “It needed some fine-tuning and it got re-programmed today. It’s hopefully a temporary problem.”
The store does also have a unique system that once the water on the roof is warmed, it is drained through four internal support columns as opposed to conventional gutters.
RELATED: How the new iPhone’s facial recognition could herald a huge expansion of mass surveillance
So that explains it. Maybe the software malfunction was due to another store upgrading their gutter system causing a slowdown in the Chicago store?
