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Steve Jobs Pitches Cupertino on Stunning New Apple Campus

Cupertino City Council Presentation by Steve Jobs

http://i.imgur.com/WVWPH.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/Et1vp.jpg

(huffingtonpost)
http://i.imgur.com/iFcEb.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/WA91s.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/qJmEE.jpg

The green highlighted area in the lower left is the current location of the Apple campus. The area in the upper right is the future campus:
http://i.imgur.com/B7dPu.jpg

Although Jobs did not disclose the architect of the plan, in December of 2010 it was announced that Foster + Partners were hired to create a plan for a new Apple campus.

The architect is obviously Foster. Who else would do something like this?

This is like the Pentagon 2. The Pentagon is the largest building in the world and can hold 23,000 people, this can do 12,000. That just puts this monstrosity into prospective. I like concept, I'm not sure I would have picked Foster though. There's too much of Foster in the world already. He's almost as bad as Calatrava and his brigdes.

i like,i like.

Pentagon is the largest Office Building, at ~6 million usable square feet. Sears Tower is the largest privately owned office building, at 4.5Msqft. This one is ~3.1Msqft, which would land somewhere around 15th largest office building in America. Comparable to the new Towers 1 & 2 at the World Trade Center site.

^ Yep, many hangars, airport terminals, and malls have much more floor area than the biggest office buildings.

With this amount of office space, it's bound to be in the record books. I bet once this thing is completed, it would set an example for future architectural styles. No doubt.

I suppose I'll wait for more details...

but this looks like a dated 90s style corporate campus...gross...i thought apple was suppose to be forward thinking...this doesn't look like a place i would want to work at...

in contrast, google purchased a building in manhattan and is making moves to urbanize it's googleplex...

That's kind of implied, I would think...building of its kind. It is the largest office BUILDING in the world.

How is this a 90's style?? This building is the first of it's kind to have that shape. It's unique, and I like how the implemented the "glass box" skyscraper concept to a low-rise building.

BTW, do you think they made the building a circular shape to represent an "apple" or fruit? I read in the article that the new spot for the campus contains "orchards." Which got me thinking: Orchard and Apple Inc. Orchard and Apple. Something's fishy. Coincidence?? I think not....

OR, they could have made it like this:

http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/...pplecampus.jpg
Photo taken from user kalsta from macrumors.com

If nothing else, they're turning an entire block into greenery. That's something.

needlessly sprawling.

There is something to be said about the working environment and creativity, and this is at least replacing a traditional office park with something that is at least creative and beautiful. There aren't going to be high rises in Cupertino any time soon, and Apple doesn't want to relocate to somewhere urban for the sake of being somewhere urban, they have a long history in Cupertino. For some reason I keep thinking about Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin county building, something architecturally significant outside the region's center. This might be similar to that.

^

I don't find this very creative or creativity-inspiring. On the interior, the view from every single fucking window will be the same (other than the foliage). How horribly monotonous. From the exterior, pretty much the same story. Creative types need variety, nooks, crannies, different environments for different moods, etc.; those things foster innovation.

On the functionality front, I don't know why offices (opposite one another) must needlessly be separated so far apart by a courtyard. An energy-efficient design would not needlessly add massive distance between co-workers.

On the image front, I think there will inevitably be detractors one day calling it a death star or something, especially, say, when Apple mis-steps or, say, gets too powerful in the music industry, etc.

So this strikes me as one of the stupidest designs ever for an office building. Do we know that this massing was the idea of Apple/Jobs and not Foster/the architect?

There are plenty of "insanely great" architects and designs out there that they could have chosen. Just one random example of interesting massing/layout just waiting to be built in California is www.big.dk/projects/ski (the main building, not the little ones), adapted in some way for office use.

^This layout works just fine for the pentagon.

I was implying the concept of building a corporate campus is 90s style, not the architecture. As someone else mentioned, it's needlessly sprawling, and for me personally, it's not anywhere I would want to work. To me, given the trends of the younger educated class, a more urban building with efficient land use and transportation options would be a better way to go. Exactly, why I mentioned some of the effort Google is putting into changing the googleplex and their additional buildings in the US

I assume you're just being sarcastic, because neither can you say the Pentagon "works fine", nor is the Apple plan even sufficiently similar to the Pentagon.

It should be a clue that a design created 70 years ago (the Pentagon was designed before the US entered WWII) might not work any more ... or that a building type designed for rigid hierarchy, staid behavior, and a somber mission, would be appropriate for a creative & research & trend-setting organization. This is driven home by the fact that it would be hard to point to any office building that has ever replicated the Pentagon idea, despite the massive 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s boom of constructing sprawling corporate campuses in cornfields around the entire country. Yesterday's US News and World Report article also isn't impressed:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20110...romthepentagon

And even some of the key redeeming aspects of the Pentagon fail to be adopted by Apple's plan: The courtyard in the Pentagon eats up only like 1/3 of the overall diameter, while Apple's plan is more like just the rind of a circle, putting huge distances between many offices. Also, Apple uses a monotonous circle, while a 5-sided building gives an opportunity for variations in views depending on where you are - not to mention all the nooks and crannies of the light courts in between the rings. If Apple had something like concentric rings and connecting passageways, then it would at least be in the Pentagon's league.

The apple logo shape someone suggested - or if they absolutely love simple shapes, how about a full sphere - would be better than this. The only real reason I could see for this shape would be to build a particle accelerator underneath it ... which is somewhat unlikely for various reasons. Also, where are the wind turbines, Steve?

That would be me :)

Apple has relied on its proximity to the R&D of Silicon Valley throughout its history. Silicon Valley is suburban. It would be out of character for Apple and the region to either establish an urban headquarters, or to put in an urban-style highrise. This will likely ruffle some feathers, but Apple is also primarily a lifestyle and design company now. Therefore this headquarters is more likely a symbol of Apple's corporate ethos/utopian ideal rather than a highly functioning facility for research, innovation, and development. This building will be another component in Apple's marketing. Not that I don't think that it could work as a functioning headquarters. Much of it depends on how the interior is organized (if you want to see a very well-designed space for R&D, look at the new MIT Media Lab).

I do get the sad feeling that this is Jobs's Xanadu though. I hope his health improves.

^ I very much agree that Apple has become a lifestyle and design company (I was hoping writing "trend-setting" could encapsulate all that), basically since their portable music player and cellphone became popular. But I would think it would be safe to say that R&D will be put in their (huge) HQ building too, not to mention their biz-development (negotiations with record companies, cellphone carriers, parts), so the HQ will probably be packaging the fashionistas, the nerds, and the testosterone biz people all in one place.

As far as suburbanism, sure, there's no reason to require a downtown high-rise there, but most of suburbia is antithetical to good design and urban planning and environmentally sensitive land use. One could argue that replicating past paradigms is decidedly un-Apple-like. It would be nice if they could think outside the box more on this.

Either way I do wish Jobs well in his health issues.