From left to right, Walt Mossberg, John Hennessy, and Salman Khan (Photo courtesy All Things D)

As someone with a daughter seven years away from college, it’s not surprising that I thought one of the most captivating sessions at the Wall Street Journal’s D10 conference this year featured Stanford president John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, and focused on how technology is impacting education.

Just the other day, my wife and I were discussing the future of higher education over lunch, from the perspective of 20 years since we finished college and less than a decade before our oldest heads to it. So many of our expectations about the college experience come from our own personal experiences, and yet the march of technology—not just in the past 20 years, but most particularly in the past five—made us wonder just what a 21st-century college should really look like.

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The Palo Alto Online has unearthed plans for a new glass-enclosed retail store going in near the current Stanford mini-store at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, CA.

The store will have three floor-to-ceiling glass walls enclosing the front of the store with a visually free-floating white roof overhead. This is a similar design to the new store being built in Portland, OR, as well as a new store in Aix-en-Provence, France. What makes this store unique, however, is the interior.


In the middle of the store, it appears that Apple's architects have placed a stone wall that separates the store into two distinct areas. A front area enclosed by glass walls, and a rear space that will include the standard Apple Retail Store product tables and counters.

From the Palo Alto Online:

One seasoned industry observer who had viewed the early drawings called the building design exquisite. "It makes an elegant and dramatic statement. It is destined to become Apple's flagship store," he said. The structure features a tall glass cube with an overhang that extends well beyond the building. "It makes the space between the outside and the inside almost indistinguishable," the source said, adding that it will bear some similarity to New York's Apple Store Fifth Avenue, which also has a distinctive glass cube as an entrance.

The new store replaces the Rugby Ralph Lauren and Williams Sonoma Home stores that were previously in the space. IFOAppleStore notes the store, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, is expected to open by the end of the year. The existing Stanford mini-store will be shuttered once the new location opens.

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