As Apple's iPhone X launches, take a look inside Apple Park: the tech giant's new $5 billion Cupertino office

Tonight, all eyes are on Cupertino for the feverishly anticipated iPhone launch — but the real star is Apple’s collosal new circular super-office. Welcome to the $5 billion campus, says David Phelan
Apple Campus 2
Foster + Partners
David Phelan12 September 2017

As you read this, the eyes of the world are turning towards Cupertino, the Californian city in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains that is home to Apple. Because today it’s announcing, at 6pm London time, the company’s latest product releases. Many are focusing on what the 10th-anniversary iPhone will look like, as the press gather for the inaugural event at the Steve Jobs Theater. But here’s the real story: from the theatre, those with a prized invitation will be able to get the world’s first proper glimpse of Apple Park.

No, it’s not a theme park, it’s the new company campus, which has cost $5 billion to build and which includes The Ring, a massive, doughnut-shaped building with a lush park at its centre. And which unkind critics have said is typical Apple because it’s looking inwards (although what spoils this quip is that there are huge windows on the outer ring of the circle, very much looking out to the world). Wags have also said there’s another Apple trademark evident in the building — it has a walled garden, just like the company’s software.

Apple Park has been a long time coming. On June 6, 2011, then-CEO Steve Jobs had hosted the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, announcing the launch of its iCloud service. He, as ever, was passionate and professional. But he looked frail — as everybody knew, he was in exceptionally poor health. So it was a surprise when, the following day, he appeared in front of a meeting of the Cupertino City Council to present proposals for a new Apple headquarters.

Jobs explained that “Apple has grown like a weed” and that the company had bought a parcel of land that was special to him. When he was 13, Bill Hewlett of computer giant Hewlett Packard had given him a summer job. At around the same time, HP had bought this land for one of its divisions. Then, decades later, when it decided to sell the now built-up plot, Apple snapped it up. “It all used to be apricot orchards and we’d like to put a new campus on that so we can stay in Cupertino. We’ve come up with a design that can put 12,000 people in one building,” Jobs declared, saying the building looked a little like a spaceship had just landed. The council meeting was his last public appearance. He died four months later.

Tim Cook is set to launch the new iPhone tonight
AP

The centrepiece of the campus he had dreamed of is a vast, circular, spaceship-like building. It has a perimeter of more than three-quarters of a mile. “There’s not a straight piece of glass in the building, it’s all curved,” Jobs had told the council. Indeed, some of these pieces of glass stretch the full four-floor height of the building (13.8m or 45ft). These are the doors to the café, and while each weighs 440,000lbs or 200 tonnes, they open silently thanks to hi-tech motorisation.

Jobs had from the start promised to change the dynamic of the site, which was mostly asphalt car parks and with just 20 per cent landscaping. Under Jobs’ vision, 80 per cent would become green spaces and this would be achieved by burying some of the car parks underground. And, of course, planting thousands of trees — many of them apricots.

The campus has been designed by British architects Foster+Partners and at the peak of the project around 250 of its staff were working on it. There were also 6,200 construction workers on the site. Foster+Partners is responsible for the recently updated look of several Apple Stores, including the recently revamped Regent Street outlet and the sleek, tactile, elegant style of that space will be reflected in Apple Park.

What might seem surprising for famously secretive Apple (a company where staff need to be careful to keep projects on lockdown) is that it has designed a building that encourages collaboration — that café with the four-storey glass doors is the only one in the building, apparently, so everybody has to bump into each other at some point.

Apple staff, who are moving in to the campus in waves, will sit collectively at large tables. There have been rumours that some people have pushed back against this, with teams objecting to this sea change — American offices have been slow to embrace the open-plan office so familiar in the London workplace, sticking with the cubicles where you can drink your soy latte in solitude. Landline desk phones will be rare — everyone is expected to communicate by smartphone. So it will be handy if, as anticipated, the new iPhones have wireless charging — and expect those desks to feature wireless charging pads, designed by Apple, naturally.

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Of course, some areas of the building will not be open to all. The teams that design new products under Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s British head of design, known to everyone as Jony, will have translucent glass around their section so that peeping eyes won’t see the secrets within.

Ive’s team will be one of the last to move in but his famously fastidious attention to detail in evidence everywhere. Such as custom-designed switches on the underside of desks so that they can be height-adjusted seamlessly. The switches have two buttons so you don’t even have to lean down and see them, one is convex, one concave. And door handles were another pored-over detail that went through extensive prototyping. The result is a handle that’s milled from a single piece of aluminium and is held in place with no visible screws.

Launch: Apple is expected to unveil it's latest iPhone tomorrow
AP

While the temperature is controlled by piping in the floors and ceilings, to compensate there’s also fresh-air ventilation. This was one of Jobs’ desires: to keep those inside connected to the world outdoors. His influence is everywhere, such as the fitness and wellness centre, a multi-storey building clad in stone distressed to resemble the former CEO’s favourite hotel in Yosemite.

If you’ve ever watched an Apple presentation, you’ll recognise certain persistent themes: after the boldly described innovations there is always an emphasis on the importance of being environmentally responsible. This might seem confusing from a company that delivers endless updates to its products but its gadgets do boast recyclable materials, arsenic-free glass, mercury-free displays and so on. Apple even has a robot called Liam which can recognise, dismantle and sort reusable elements from an iPhone that’s reached the end of its life. So it’s no surprise that Apple values green energy.

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As CEO Tim Cook told me earlier this year: “We very much care about our environment. We set out on a goal which seemed reckless at the time of running Apple on 100 per cent renewable energy. I’m proud to say today we run Apple on 93 per cent renewable energy and we’re going to make that extra seven.” So the new campus will be mostly powered from an onsite low-carbon plant, supplemented by solar panels that cover much of the building’s roofs. There are also reports that the campus will use recycled water.

For now, the press will mostly be focusing on the Steve Jobs Theater, which is likely to offer its own glimpses of Apple’s pursuit of perfection. The building is made up of a circular glass wall that supports a silver-disc roof. To reach the auditorium you must descend spiral staircases or take a lift — and even this simple task became an engineering test. The circular nature of the building means you enter the lift on one side but exit on the other. So the lift has two sets of doors, right? Oh no, they only wanted one door, so the lift gently rotates as it descends. Only Apple.

And that’s as it should be. The best corporate HQs are expressions of the ambitions and outlook of the people who work in them. Apple Park is no exception. The building weaves in its late co-founder’s passions and idiosyncrasies. It displays the brand’s pursuit of function wrapped in beauty. Its sheer size and the commitment to architecture makes clear: we will be shaping your lives for a very long time. And, as Apple battles in a ruthless smartphone market, it must also hope that the Apple Park will inspire its staff to keep their finger on the power button of invention for many years to come.

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