Ever since the first renderings of the magnificent “Apple Spaceship” headquarters surfaced back in August, 2011, everyone’s been wondering what it will be like to work inside the four-story, 2.8 million square-foot ring-shaped “Campus 2.”
Now the City of Cupertino has released dozens of new graphics that reveal the beauty of this utopian environment for 13,000 lucky Apple employees.
If you’ve ever built a house, you know that a builder will raise eyebrows when you ask for anything curved, because it’s such an expensive undertaking to build structures that are not straight and square. Undaunted, Apple is building a headquarters that the company hopes will be the world’s best — and it won’t have a straight piece of glass in it, according to the late Steve Jobs:
“It’s a pretty amazing building. It’s a little like a spaceship landed. It’s got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle. It’s a circle. It’s curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It’s all curved. We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building. … It’s pretty cool.”
With construction of the $5 billion headquarters starting in 2014, Apple expects the building to be completed in mid-2016.
Images: City of Cupertino, via Wired