Jony Ive in the Foster + Partner designed Cupertino headquarters
Apple’s chief design officer Jony Ive in the brand’s new HQ, with a glimpse of the 175-acre Apple Park in the background. Employees can get around it on one of 2,000 custom-built bicycles, painted a particular Apple grey
This was the first up-close mass sighting of the most talked-about new building in the world, a $5bn, or so it’s said, Foster + Partners-designed loop of glass, aluminium, limestone and concrete and Apple’s new HQ. Guests worked their way up an artificial hill, part of 175 acres of undulating new landscape where once was dead-flat parking facility and dull corporate sheds, most of it owned by Hewlett-Packard. This engineered topography, a fantasy of California, gentle and abundant, was borne of the earth removed to make way for the new building’s earthquake-proof foundations, and has been planted with 9,000 trees, including cherry, apricot, apple, persimmon and pear.
All those trees, as was the intention
mean that the 2.8 million sq ft new building never fully reveals itself. You see only sections and its giant curve is never apparent. Nor, given the elevation, are two of its four storeys. Drones have buzzed over this site during much of its construction, and of course there were renders. Still, nothing prepares you for its audacious mass. Or its sci-fi drama. It is, as was promised, a giant starship landed in Cupertino.
The keynote is taking place in the new Steve Jobs Theater, itself a small marvel of engineering, ingenuity and attention to detail. ‘If the overall project is a small town, then this is the town hall, and jewel,’ says Stefan Behling, a Foster + Partners partner and one of the lead architects on Apple Park. Above ground, the theatre is essentially a 165ft-diameter glass rotunda with no visible support. ‘In the beginning there was just this idea: “Let’s have a hovering roof”, just this sliver of roof floating in the landscape,’ says Behling. ‘And it has been the most difficult building of my career.’
