This article was taken from the July 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In 1986 Jobs bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas for $5 million (the equivalent of £6 million at today's rates). Jobs was smarting from being forced out of Apple and saw the fledgling firm as a potential investment. He wasn't interested in animation -- he was drawn to the Pixar Image Computer, a $135,000 machine capable of generating complex graphic visualisations. But the expensive computers were a commercial flop, which meant that Jobs and the Pixar team had to come up with a Plan B.
That back-up plan was making computer-animated movies. Pixar now has an unprecedented record of commercially and critically successful films, including Up, WALL·E and
The Incredibles. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company purchased it for $7.4 billion.
How did Jobs help establish one of the most successful movie studios of all time? One important factor involves architecture.
The Pixar studios are set in an old canning factory, just north of Oakland, California. The original design called for three buildings, with separate offices for the computer scientists, animators and management. The smaller buildings were cheaper to build, but Jobs scrapped the plan. ("We used to joke that the building was Steve's movie," says Ed Catmull, the current president of Pixar. "He really oversaw everything.") Jobs completely re-imagined the studio. Instead of three buildings, there was a single vast space, with an airy atrium at its centre. "The philosophy behind this design is that it's good to put the most important function at the heart of the building," Catmull says. "Our most important function is the interaction of our employees.
He wanted to create an open area for people to always be talking to each other."
But he needed to force people to go there. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby, then moved the meeting rooms to the centre of the building, followed by the cafeteria, coffee bar and gift shop. Jobs eventually decided to locate the bathrooms in the atrium. He believed that the best meetings happened by accident. And he was right. Pixar employees say that many of their best ideas arrive not while sat at their desk, but when they're having a bowl of cereal with a colleague or having a chat in the bathroom.
Jonah Lehrer wrote about the search for a cure for stress in issue 09.10
More from the Steve Jobs MBA [
Unit 101: Future thinking](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-101) [
Unit 102: People pay more if it's worth it](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-102) Unit 104: Master the entire business
Unit 105: Build from the bottom up
Unit 106: Interpret, don't impersonate
Unit 107: It's all about design [
Unit 108: Dazzle your audience](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-108) [
Unit 109: Steve Jobs: in his own words](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-109)
Unit 110: Challenge the expectations of others [
Unit 111: Be your own competition](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-111)
Unit 112: Reboot, reboot, reboot [
Unit 113: The big reveal is the best advertising](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-113) [
Unit 114: Stay hungry, stay foolish](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unit-114)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
