The New Apple Campus by Foster and Partners Opens for Employees in April

The New Apple Campus by Foster + Partners Opens for Employees in April

Apple announced that they will be moving in their employees to their new campus Apple Park in Cupertino, California, starting next April. The campus, designed by Foster + Partners, will be receiving a total of 12,000 employees within a six months duration. In the meanwhile, further construction works on the buildings and parklands will be taking place over the summer.

Apple Park is comprised of a huge ring-shaped building, clad entirely in the world’s largest curved glass panels and surrounded by vast greenery. The 2.8 million sqft (260,000 sqm) ring is an embodiment of Steve Jobs’ vision for a “center for creativity and collaboration.” The memory of the late co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. will be honored by naming the new campus’s theater after him, Steve Jobs Theater. The theater is located on top of a hill, at one of the campus’s highest points, viewing the main building and the meadows, and it will be opening later this year with a 1000-seat capacity.

Besides the theater, the new campus will include a visitors’ center with an Apple Store and an open café for the public. It will, also, have a fitness center for the employees and secure research and development facilities. The surrounding parklands will provide the employees with two miles of walkways and running paths, in addition to an orchard, meadow, and a pond within the interior of the ring-shaped building.

Apple Park, which had 5 million sqft of asphalt replaced with meadows and native trees, was designed to be energy efficient. It will be powered by 100% renewable energy, and it will, also, be running the world’s largest on-site solar energy installations, with 17 megawatt of rooftop solar panels. The building will not require any heating or air conditioning during 9 months of the year, since it will be naturally ventilated.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook explained Steve Job’s influence on the design of the new campus: “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.”

The businesswoman and widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs has, also, confirmed that the new campus would have been the perfect workplace for Jobs and will be so for the current Apple employees: “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.”

Before his death in 2011, Jobs had, actually, spent a good amount of time with Foster + Partners designers to develop an optimum design for the incorporation’s new campus. “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,” said Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. “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.”