Recent drone footage from American Aerial Videographer Matthew Roberts, reveals Apple Park, one of the biggest corporate campuses in the world, and the soon-to-be new HQ for Apple Incorporated nearing completion.
Designed by Foster+Partners in collaboration with the Apple Design Team, the campus features an enormous yet elegant ring-shaped office complex at its core surrounded by a plethora of other buildings and structures all of which are embedded within vast green parkland.
The project which began in 2010, is scheduled to open it doors to over 12 000 company employees this April. A press release from Foster+Partners dated 23 February 2017 offers more detail about the project. Apple today announced that Apple Park, the company’s new 175-acre (70 hectares) campus, will be ready for employees to begin occupying in April. The process of moving more than 12,000 people will take over six months, and construction of the buildings and parklands is scheduled to continue through the summer.
Envisioned by Steve Jobs as a center for creativity and collaboration, Apple Park is transforming miles of asphalt sprawl into a haven of green space in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley. The campus’ ring-shaped, 2.8 million-square-foot (260 000 sqm) main building is clad entirely in the world’s largest panels of curved glass.
Steve would have turned 62 this Friday, February 24. To honor his memory and his enduring influence on Apple and the world, the theater at Apple Park will be named the Steve Jobs Theater. Opening later this year, the entrance to the 1,000-seat auditorium is a 20-foot-tall (6 meters) glass cylinder, 165 feet (50 meters) in diameter, supporting a metallic carbon-fiber roof. The Steve Jobs Theater is situated atop a hill — one of the highest points within Apple Park — overlooking meadows and the main building.
“Steve’s vision for Apple stretched far beyond his time with us. He intended Apple Park to be the home of innovation for generations to come,…The workspaces and parklands are designed to inspire our team as well as benefit the environment. We’ve achieved one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world and the campus will run entirely on renewable energy.”
-Tim Cook, Apple CEO
Steve was exhilarated, and inspired, by the California landscape, by its light and its expansiveness. It was his favorite setting for thought. Apple Park captures his spirit uncannily well,…He would have flourished, as the people of Apple surely will, on this luminously designed campus.”
-Laurene Powell Jobs
“Steve invested so much of his energy creating and supporting vital, creative environments. We have approached the design, engineering and making of our new campus with the same enthusiasm and design principles that characterize our products,…Connecting extraordinarily advanced buildings with rolling parkland creates a wonderfully open environment for people to create, collaborate and work together. We have been extremely fortunate to be able to work closely, over many years, with the remarkable architectural practice Foster + Partners.”
-Jonathan Ive, Apple chief design officer
Apple Park will also include a visitors center with an Apple Store and cafe open to the public, a 100,000-square-foot (9300 sqm) fitness center for Apple employees, secure research and development facilities and the Steve Jobs Theater. The parklands offer two miles of walking and running paths for employees, plus an orchard, meadow and pond within the ring’s interior grounds.
Designed in collaboration with Foster + Partners, Apple Park replaces 5 million-square-feet (465 000 sqm) of asphalt and concrete with grassy fields and over 9,000 native and drought-resistant trees, and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy. With 17 megawatts of rooftop solar, Apple Park will run one of the largest on-site solar energy installations in the world. It is also the site of the world’s largest naturally ventilated building, projected to require no heating or air conditioning for nine months of the year.
CONSTRUCTION IMAGES COURTESY ARCHDAILY
