Since 2009, Foster and Partners have been working on a new headquarters for the tech giant Apple, originally in close collaboration with Steve Jobs, its founder, who saw it as one of his last crucial contribution to his legacy. Even though dramatic photographs of the ring-shaped structure have been flooding the Internet for some time now, there hasn’t really been any deep dives into the mega-project—until now.

Writing for Wired, Steven Levy weaves together long-awaited details about its appearance with issues of architectural representation and the brand identity of Apple, which the “spaceship” is intended to embody.

“Inside the 755-foot tunnel, the white tiles along the wall gleam like a recently installed high-end bathroom; it's what the Lincoln Tunnel must have looked like the day it opened, before the first smudge of soot sullied its walls. And as we emerge into the light, the Ring comes into view. As the Jeep orbits it, the sun glistens off the building's curved glass surface. The "canopies"-white fins that protrude from the glass at every floor-give it an exotic, retro-future feel, evoking illustrations from science fiction pulp magazines of the 1950s. Along the inner border of the Ring, there is a walkway where one can stroll the three quarter-mile perimeter of the building unimpeded. It's a statement openness, of free movement, that one might not have associated with Apple. And that's part of the point.”

Unlike the offices of other tech corporations like Google or Airbnb, Apple’s comprises just one large structure meant to accommodate 12,000 people, which alone gives away an intention to curate particular kinds of interaction. The author describes the organization of the space:

“As with any Apple product, its shape would be determined by its function. This would be a workplace where people were open to each other and open to nature, and the key to that would be modular sections, known as pods, for work or collaboration. Jobs' idea was to repeat those pods over and over: pod for office work, pod for teamwork, pod for socializing, like a piano roll playing a Philip Glass composition. They would be distributed democratically. Not even the CEO would get a suite or a similar incongruity. And while the company has long been notorious for internal secrecy, compartmentalizing its projects on a need-to-know basis, Jobs seemed to be proposing a more porous structure where ideas would be more freely shared across common spaces.”

Even in that, there is an obvious emphasis on corporate representation—a shaping of an image of community, open flow and creatively engaged lifestyles. The brand’s identity permeates all formal and programmatic design decisions. Levy writes:

“From planes descending to SFO, and even from drones that buzz the building from a hundred feet above it, the Ring looks like an ominous icon, an expression of corporate power, and a what-the-fuck oddity among the malls, highways, and more mundane office parks of suburban Silicon Valley. But peering out the windows and onto the vast hilly expanse of the courtyard, all of that peels away. It feels ... peaceful, even amid the clatter and rumble of construction. It turns out that when you turn a skyscraper on its side, all of its bullying power dissipates into a humble serenity.”

The building is surrounded in greenery—an attempt to protect it from the inorganic world that lies behind the artificial hills separating the campus from the freeways of Cupertino. One of the other main design goals was to blur the line between the inside and the outside, allowing nature to quietly prevail.

Its open-air pathways and carefully curated gardens all are intended to represent Steve Jobs’s utopian idea of a “thinking space”.

“Apple will ultimately plant almost 9,000 trees. Muffly was told that the landscape should be futureproof and that he should choose drought tolerant varieties so his mini forest and meadows could survive a climate crisis. (As part of its ecological efforts to prevent such a crisis, Apple claims, its buildings will run solely on sustainable energy, most of it from solar arrays on the roofs.) Jobs' aims were not just aesthetic. He did his best thinking during walks and was especially inspired by ambling in nature, so he envisioned how Apple workers would do that too. "Can you imagine doing your work in a national park?" says Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs as CEO in 2011. "When I really need to think about something I'm struggling with, I get out in nature. We can do that now! It won't feel like Silicon Valley at all."

This merging of interior and exterior has also been facilitated through technology.

“Jobs hated air-conditioning and especially loathed fans. (He vigilantly tried to keep them out of his computers.) But he also didn't want people opening windows, so he insisted on natural ventilation, a building that breathes just like the people who work inside it. "The flaps and the opening mechanism," Behling explains, "all have to relate to sensors that measure where the wind is coming from and how the air goes through it." Unlike sealed buildings in which the temperature is rigidly controlled, the Ring circulates outside air. The concrete in the floor and ceiling is embedded with tubes of water and is supposed to lock in a temperature between 68 and 77 degrees, so that the heating or cooling system will kick in only on very hot or cold days.”

On that note, Apple's Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, says - "It's not like we're asking people to be uncomfortable at work….We're asking them to recognize that part of being connected to the outside is knowing what temperature it is. We don't want you to feel like you're in a casino.”

The campus also seems to have been inspired by Steve Job’s nostalgia for particular landscapes:

“His briefing was all about California-his idealized California," says Stefan Behling, a Foster partner who became one of the project leads.

Beyond those grand concepts meant to spatially re-enforce and represent Apple, there is also an abundance of intriguing problem-solving. Levy’s article provides us descriptions of the high importance placed on details manifested through custom designed and manufactured—well, everything, from unprecedented sized glass panels to faucets and door handles. To say that materials were taken seriously by Jobs and the architects feels like an understatement.

As with the suppliers for its consumer products, Apple was demanding with its contractors, requiring them to solve problems they had never contemplated before. Such as: How does one create the largest, strongest pieces of glass in the world? Oh, and they have to be curved. "Steve loved the idea of huge pieces of glass," Behling says. In designing its retail stores over the years, Apple has developed a relationship with a German company, Seele Group; the previous pinnacle of their collaboration was the huge glass cage on New York City's Fifth Avenue store. The Ring makes that widely praised wonder look like a security barrier at a check-cashing counter. Its "walls" are 45-foot-tall panels of safety glass. Seele already owned the only machine for forging such panels, but even that could bake only one panel at a time. Since the process takes 14 hours and Apple needed 800 panels, Seele's capacity was insufficient. So Seele worked with its autoclave manufacturer to develop a much bigger cooker that could stack five panels at once. "The one we had was the biggest in the glass industry by far.

Other elements of the structure were approached with the same attention to detail as this one-of-a-kind glass. For the author, the overall opulence (the building cost reported as $5 billion in construction) combined with the almost utopian vision of the building’s power and impact contrasts with the company’s current state.

“the campus's opening comes at a point when, despite stellar earnings results, Apple has not launched a breakout product since Jobs' death.”

Many critique Apple’s isolated and luxurious campus as snobby and perverse. When Peter Cook and Norman Foster respond they mostly express confident hope in the building's potential to inspire and engage its users, to serve as a powerful catalyst for the important work that is meant to take place there.

They also speak of the architecture as Steve Job's quasi-metaphysical embodiment—the presence of whose spirit radiates a certain guidance and oversight for the company: “Steve’s gift.”

Those sincere sentiments are perplexing to evaluate and so Steven Levy cheekily yet poignantly acknowledges a thought-provoking truth -

“Yes, Apple insists that by working in a place where artificial hills are dotted with pines transplanted from Christmas tree farms in the Mojave Desert, its employees will make better products. But didn't Apple create its marvelous Apple II in a bedroom and its groundbreaking Macintosh in a low-slung office park building? The employees who work at the new campus are leaving behind the buildings that provided sufficient inspiration to invent the iPhone.”

“...Is Apple Park the arcadia outlined by Jobs in his public farewell, or is it an anal-retentive nightmare of indulgence gone wild?”