Archinect - News

An exquisite drone tour over Apple's new campus reveals the pond, furniture, + a new theater

2017-04-20T12:35:00-04:00

Like a miniature perfectionist city, the new Apple campus in Cupertino is made up of several different buildings: there's the familiar Norman Foster-designed "spaceship," as well as a massive parking garage that features gleaming solar panels atop the roof.

This drone video reveals that very little of the landscaping has come in yet--a few trees, in their boxy planters, hang out outside the main building, and only a few plants have been installed in the equipment-strewn courtyard--but it offers an excellent tour of the Steve Jobs Theatre which is slated to open this summer:

Perfectionists versus contractors: the details of building the Apple Campus

2017-02-09T13:45:00-05:00

One of the most vexing features was the doorways, which Apple wanted to be perfectly flat, with no threshold. The construction team pushed back, but Apple held firm. The rationale? If engineers had to adjust their gait while entering the building, they risked distraction from their work, according to a former construction manager. “We spent months trying not to do that because that’s time, money and stuff that’s never been done before,” the former construction manager said.

Although detail-obsessed architects can often find working with broad-strokes contractors to be challenging, there's one group of designers with perhaps even more rigorous attention to detail: the team at Apple. According to this article in Reuters, the actual building of the "spaceship" Apple Campus in Cupertino has been an unusually precise experience for those working in construction. According to the article, among many other requirements, "Apple's in-house construction team enforced many rules: No vents or pipes could be reflected in the glass. Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building ran to some 30 pages." Think perfect?

Watch this 6-month time lapse drone video of the Apple Campus 2

2016-12-16T18:47:00-05:00

With all the drone construction videos of the new Apple Campus 2 (AC2) circulating on the interwebs, it's easy to lose track of what the progress has been on this Foster-designed Goliath of a project just in recent months.

Luckily this latest 4K video by Matthew Roberts on YouTube provides a handy 6-month time lapse of key campus sites, like 'the Spaceship,' auditorium/theater, primary access tunnel, research & development facility, the atrium, main parking garages, fitness center, maintenance facility, and the infamous 'mountain of dirt.'

Watch the video further below.

All images via Matthew Roberts' drone video on YouTube.

More recent AC2 news on Archinect:

New photos of the interior and exterior of Apple's Norman Foster-designed campus

2016-12-14T12:34:00-05:00

French website Mac Generation has obtained photos of newly completed portions of the Apple Campus 2 as designed by Foster + Partners. The exterior, which in renderings possessed a certain monolithic frisbee quality, is far more vivid in real life. Here are photos of both the interior and exterior, including a shot of one of the roof's 59 skylights:

Apple is expected to start moving its operations into the building in 2017.

For more on the Apple Campus:

Apple's spaceship campus, by the numbers (including an estimated $5b price tag)

2016-06-13T15:21:00-04:00

The Spaceship, as many have nicknamed it, is over one mile in circumference—that's wider than the Pentagon. When it’s completed later this year it will house 13,000 employees [...] Campus 2 will run entirely on clean energy, powered by renewable sources. But what’s really grabbed our attention are the thousands of panels of curved window panes—the largest pieces of structural glass ever made [...] Equally cool are the 60,000 pounds of hollow concrete slabs that allow the building to “breathe”

According to PopSci, here are some integral stats to Apple's new "spaceship" Campus 2, set to finish later this year:

176: Acres the new Campus will occupy
1.23 million: Square footage of glass involved in the project
3,000: Approximate total number of glass panes used
7,000: Weight, in pounds, of the heaviest panes of vertical glass
4,300: Concrete slabs needed for the floor and ceiling
60,000: How many pounds the heaviest concrete slabs weigh
75: Percentage of renewable energy that campus itself will produce during peak daytime hours
16: Megawatts of power produced by rooftop solar panels
5 billion: Total cost, in dollars, this project is reported to approximately cost (Apple declined to comment on an official figure)

Watch PopSci tour the construction site below:

Related on Archinect:

Check out the latest 4K drone footage of the new Apple campus

2016-04-04T19:05:00-04:00

According to schedule, Apple employees will start moving into the new Apple campus –nicknamed AC2 – in about eight months. Tim Cook, the current CEO of the tech giant, called their last product launch "probably the last" to be held in the Cupertino town hall before the move.

For more on AC2, check out some past coverage:

Apple's new spaceship campus is taking shape

2016-03-15T15:30:00-04:00

Apple's new campus has received significant attention during its development phase [...] Apple has shared with Mashable exclusive details and photos of its new corporate offices, including the theater that will serve as the venue for future Apple product launches. While we've been hearing about the design of the campus and its facilities for nearly five years, installation of the massive, curved glass panels that surround the Main Building’s spaceship-like design is about 33% complete.

Here are a few more photos of the latest construction progress. Head over to Mashable for more images.

The Foster + Partners-designed structure previously in the Archinect news:

Construction update: More (unofficial) drone footage of Apple's spaceship campus

2015-09-01T23:48:00-04:00

Apple's "spaceship" campus continues to be a hotspot for drones to film the project gradually coming to life. One of those drones belongs to Silicon Valley-based photographer/videographer Duncan Sinfield, who posted a new video today showing the latest additions to the campus. As Sinfield pilots his DJI Inspire 1 over the construction site, the resulting video is intermittently overlapped by flashback footage that was shot exactly one month ago for some rough comparisons. Adding a somewhat surreal vibe, the late Steve Jobs "narrates" the footage as he describes the campus to the Cupertino City Council in a 2011 clip.

Check out the video right below.

Apple invites visitors to gaze at its 'spaceship' from new observation deck

2015-07-30T14:12:00-04:00

You’ll will still be able to gaze lovingly upon the ultra-sleek new Cupertino “Spacehip” campus — no drones required. Buried in city documents filed this spring are previously unreported plans for a new visitor’s center — complete with a store and viewing platform. Apple’s 2013 approvals for the massive project included the ability for Apple to build a visitor’s center, but a detailed project description had not been submitted until April.

Apple's spaceship campus being built to iPhone standards

2015-07-10T12:46:00-04:00

"There were many meetings when the Apple representative would pick up your [iPhone] and say: 'That's what we're building.' What that means is — if you look at the phone, there's the sheen on the phone, there's the bevel on the phone, there's how much shine they have ... every piece of that phone is engineered, and the building is the same way." [...] The project is so extensive — and Apple is so demanding — that Apple Campus 2 has effectively "raised the bar for construction standards"

For more news on Apple's under-construction second campus in Cupertino:

Drone footage shows the latest construction status of the Foster-designed Apple campus

2015-01-05T11:55:00-05:00

Construction is moving along on Apple's new concentric campus dubbed the "spaceship". Today high resolution drone footage was released (unofficially) showing the current status.

Apple 2 campus taking shape, NCARB names names, and cities sell out: News Round-Up for September 2, 2014

2014-09-09T18:04:00-04:00

Friday, September 5:

Beijing public transit commuters can now pay fares with empty bottles: Beijingers can insert a recyclable bottle and receive equivalent rebates in train fares or mobile phone credits.
Community Bus Stops Transform Brazil: Thousands of Brazil's bus stops are unmarked, leading fed-up residents to install their own signage under the Que Ônibus Passa Aqui? (Which Bus Stops Here?) program, one of the world's biggest community projects.
Town Becomes a Beer Ad, but Residents Don’t Feel Like a Party: Crested Butte, Colorado, population 1,500, was outfitted for a three-day party to publicize Bud Light, with 1,000 partiers vetted and shipped in by Anheuser-Busch. The town's Mayor agreed to host the party to the tune of $500,000, in part to help boost the town's mostly tourist economy during the difficult "shoulder" season between summer and winter.
Gehry's Revised Eisenhower Memorial Loses Two Controversial Tapestries, But Concerns Remain: Nitpicking continues over the Memori...

Apple Campus 2 construction: house i-something is building

2014-09-01T12:30:00-04:00

"Small is huge" - Mac mini slogan in early 2009.

It's a giant circling pit. How I wish that was a moat filled with crocodile data, making it impossible for software architects to escape the premises and create even more tech for the masses.

Is the new thing in architecture medievalism?