Archinect - News

New images of Apple Park Visitor Center as it opens to the public

2017-11-27T14:44:00-05:00

Over a decade in the making, Apple's newly completed campus finally welcomed the general public on November 17th with the grand opening celebration of the Apple Park Visitor Center. There, customers can sip on coffee and snacks; purchase a range of Apple products and accessories, including Apple Park-exclusive T-shirts, hats, postcards, baby onesies, playing cards, and tote bags; and gawk at a 3D model of the campus that provides guests with information through an augmented reality experience.

Apple Campus. © Nigel Young/Foster+Partners

Designed by the company's de facto architectural firm in residence, Foster + Partners, the structure's main feature is a cantilevered carbon fiber roof designed to float. Sound familiar? Along with the staircases, stone walls, terrazzo floors and glass façade a bird would easily fly into, the design is very much alike their also freshly completed flagship store in Chicago, and features similar elements as the...

New photos of the 'floating' carbon fiber roof Foster + Partners designed for Apple

2017-10-03T15:27:00-04:00

While most of Apple's new Cupertino campus is still under construction, a small crown jewel, the Foster + Partners-designed Steve Jobs Theater, already attracted the world's attention when it hosted the unveiling of the latest iPhone models last month.

Now we've received new, fascinating photographs that show how both firms — architect and client — applied their trademark obsession with details to a building that was especially close to the late namesake's heart.

The building's most striking feature — the record-breaking, disc-like
roof that appears floating in mid air — is not only an engineering feat
but also a damn thing of beauty: weighing 80.7 tons and spanning 155 feet, it is the world's largest carbon fiber roof and also takes the podium for all-glass-supported structure.

Here are some more details about the Steve Jobs Theater project we've received from F+P:

Carbon fiber roof:

The Theater lobby roof is the largest self-supporting fully carbon fiber roof in the world.
The ro...

Christopher Hawthorne: Apple and Amazon's architectural visions "owe nothing to the American city"

2017-09-14T17:58:00-04:00

It has also been remarkable to watch Amazon pursue a dramatically different strategy. Its plans for a second headquarters suggest that in terms of architecture and campus planning it wants to be everything Apple is not. It wants to lean into the city — and thorny questions about gentrification and housing prices, to the extent that they will be a natural byproduct of this process — rather than away from it.

"Though he took a very different path to get there," Hawthorne writes in his LAT opinion piece analyzing Apple & Amazon's lofty headquarters ambitions with a focus on urban integration (or the complete lack thereof), "Bezos ultimately reached the same conclusion Jobs did: that the wealthiest and most powerful tech companies owe nothing to the American city."

Architecture critic Rowan Moore on the extravagant “palace” headquarters of tech giants

2017-07-25T20:46:00-04:00

It’s also striking that for all its fame Silicon Valley makes little impression on the visual consciousness of the world – there’s not a strong sense of what it actually looks like. Until now it has lacked landmarks. But that much power and that much money will not always be happy to be unobtrusive. We are only just beginning to see the ways in which it can change the landscape of cities.

Architecture critic Rowan Moore analyzes how tech giants Apple, Google, and Facebook are appointing world-famous architecture firms to design their increasingly extravagant office campuses, as symbols of their global power.

“For the tech giants are now in the same position as great powers in the past – the bankers of the Italian Renaissance, the skyscraper-builders of the 20th century, the Emperor Augustus, Victorian railway companies – whereby, whether they want to or not, their size and wealth find expression in spectacular architecture [...],” Moore writes. “Having as much sense of their own importance as those previous powers, tech companies probably don’t mind commissioning structures that define their time.”

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:

Foster + Partners' Apple "spaceship" set to touch down and open up in April

2017-02-23T12:57:00-05:00

According to a press release from Apple, it will take six months to move all 12,000 employees into the 175-acre campus, which will officially open for occupancy in April. In addition to the 2.8 million square foot, naturally ventilated Foster + Partners'-designed "spaceship" building, the campus features two miles of running and walking paths, and boasts a 17 megawatt solar energy rooftop installation (making it one of the largest in the world). Nothing about this place is small, or happenstance; the construction process was reportedly a clash between perfectionist designers and slightly more impressionistic contractors.

However, all's well that ends well: although Steve Jobs won't be able to see the completed campus, designer Apple's chief design officer Jony Ivy feels like things worked out. “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 ...

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:

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