The Genius Design of Apple Park

12:25
As a structural engineer, I love this theater. It looks unstable at first glance, but honestly, it's 2" thick of glass, so as long as you secure each glass panel top, bottom, and both sides, they will basically all act as a rigid body, and nothing will be able to move in any direction. If you were to rotate all of the panels 90° and had them all pointing outwards, them all toppling simultaneously would be a possible failure mechanism. These panels perfectly negate that possibility. As an example, see the Apple Kunming Pavilion and how they add panels orientated like these every 3rd panel to keep it stable. Another option would be to add moment-resisting connections top and bottom, but then you're asking the glass to sustain loads in bending and it can fail catastrophically if heavily stressed.
 
Something that might not be immediately apparent, is how critical the roof is to holding it all together. As any single panel that tries to fall inwards ("Out Of Plane" of the glass), due to wind or its own inertia during an earthquake, is braced by the ground below and the roof above, which can then send the force perpendicular out to the left and right panels of glass that can easily take that force in their strong orientation ("In Plane" of the glass). At this point, a single wooden house stands up due to it's own self weight, but here there are probably strong anchors to prevent any motion at all (to keep the seals strong, so these anchors would need to take the full seismic loads). This whole system is also very much an idealized upside-down-pendulum design, making figuring out the seismic demands relatively easy and accurate.
 
In general it's quite a marvelous design. The whole thing depends on a very lightweight and strong roof, and this one happens to be made of carbon fiber, so there you go. Even tho I don't like Apple at all as a company, I love the engineering that was done on this whole building, and the theater in particular. I want to hear more about the (likely, this is just a guess) seismic isolators and dampening system used in the main building.