Apple is putting the finishing touches to its new Cupertino headquarters, a huge space-vessel-like complex and signed by the architect Norman Foster, who represents the quadrature of the circle for many in the technology industry: it is possible to grow until power oozes from The offices.
Apple Park is a ring-shaped campus that, along its more than 708,000 square meters, uses multiple innovations to realize some of Steve Jobs’ dreams, including replicating the sense of openness and freedom they will expect outside of work To its 12,000 occupants.
The eight years it has taken to be ready let him boast of big numbers and technical marvels, such as a four-story glass door, but for Apple’s design chief Jonathan Ive, the biggest achievement was ” Where many people can connect, collaborate, walk and talk, “writes Wired magazine.
That was the main idea of ​​Jobs, Apple’s co-founder turned technology guru, who spent the two years prior to his death in 2011 developing the details of a complex that would combine nature and functionality with a team of architects led by Norman Foster.
According to the company, Apple Park, which will begin to be inhabited by employees from an unspecified June date, is the largest naturally ventilated building in the world and is designed to require no heating or air conditioning for nine months at year.
“We have achieved one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world and the campus will run on renewable energy alone,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook on the sustainability of the project.
Like any great technology that prevails today, Apple did not spare on curiosities for its new facilities. The most striking: the Steve Jobs auditorium, with cylindrical shape, glass walls 6 meters high and capacity for 1,000 people.
In addition, employees will be able to exercise, go to the doctor or relax in a 9,000-square-foot wellness center that hides a two-story yoga room, covered in a type of stone reminiscent of Jobs’s favorite hotel in Yosemite.
Or perhaps they will prefer to disconnect in the cafeteria, where up to 4,000 workers can sit between the main floor and balcony areas, even outdoors in good weather, opening the two huge glass doors that rise along the four Floors of the enclosure.
With a budget of $ 5 billion, the building is prepared against earthquakes and surrounded by 9,000 drought-resistant trees, characteristics that sow the ground to work in the “idealized California” by Jobs.
Although initially Apple Park was to occupy an enclosure of 303,000 square meters less than two kilometers of its central office, Infinite Loop, the exit to the market of a plot previously occupied by Hewlett-Packard (HP), where Jobs worked one summer to the 12 years, changed the destiny of the headquarters.
Far from Apple’s early days, whose first computers came to light in 1977 in the garage of Jobs’s family home, now considered a historic place in Los Altos and situated not too far from the garage where his admired HP also took its first steps, In Palo Alto.
As a coming-of-the-future spacecraft, Apple Park comes to say what only a few can today: it is difficult, but not impossible, to achieve success in the competitive technology industry and not die in the attempt; For Apple has been extended for four decades.
