Foster + Partners began designing the Apple Park during Steve Jobs's lifetime, and the way the company's second headquarters looks like is completely dictated by his taste. The Apple founder once called Norman Foster himself and asked the architect to "help" him.
Apple Park covers 71 hectares and is located one and a half kilometers from the first headquarters. The centerpiece of the campus is a 260,000 m2 ring-shaped building2, where all 12 thousand employees of the company will work.
The “perfect circle,” as Apple calls it, has four aboveground and three underground floors. Its completely transparent walls are constructed from 15m x 3.2m bendable glass sheets (customers call them the largest in the world), and the floor and ceiling are made of concrete hollow panels. Jobs insisted that no seams were visible in the interior decoration, and all furniture was made of only one kind of maple wood.
The area of the circular courtyard is 12 hectares. Apricot, cherry and apple orchards will be planted here, an olive grove will be laid out, a pond will be dug and winding walking paths will be laid.
The second striking building on the campus is a building on a hill called the Steve Jobs Theater. There will be presentations of new Apple products and press conferences. The "theater" is also glass, its façade echoes the main building. However, this is no longer a ring, but a circle. At the same time, it does not have a single visible supporting column, and the roof is lightweight, made of carbon fiber. In fact, the ground section is just a huge lobby with a panoramic view of the campus. The audience itself for a thousand seats is located below it.
Car parks with bases for recharging electric cars and access tunnels to the campus are also taken underground. It is planned that everyone will move around on bicycles.
The corporation said its new office would be the world's most energy efficient building. It will only use renewable energy. The rooftop solar panels will cover 75% of the peak load (approximately 16 MW), with the remainder provided by the Bloom Box Energy Server modular generator set, which runs on biofuels and natural gas. The natural ventilation system will allow you to do without heating and air conditioning for 9 months a year.
The campus will also house well-protected product design and development laboratories, several cafeterias, a fitness center and a visitor center with an Apple Store and café. The first employees will be transferred to Apple Park in April, but construction and landscaping work will not be completed by this time, so the entire move will take six months.
