Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The Apple Mothership ... Literally


From TUAW:

At a Cupertino City Council meeting last night, Steve Jobs presented plans for Apple's new campus off I-280 in Cupertino. As you can see from the image above, the campus resembles a spaceship. The entire campus will be one huge round building with a courtyard in the middle. The building itself will be four stories tall, and Apple plans to re-landscape the current area to include 6000 trees. A natural gas energy center will be on-campus to power the new building, and Apple will only rely on California's power grid as a backup.


Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet. But wait - it gets even cooler than the building creating its own freaking power:

Speaking to the City Council, Steve Jobs described the new campus (as transcribed by MacRumors): "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.


And then there's this from Macrumors.com:

The facility will be 80% landscaping, with most of the parking underground, compared to 20% landscaping with all above ground parking currently. The current campus has 3,700 trees and Apple plans to increase that to more than 6,000 trees, including "some apricot orchards."


Much of Cupertino, and specifically where the Apple campus currently sits, was once apricot orchards in the early days of Silicon Valley. Poetic.

See the entire presentation here:

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