Apple’s “spaceship campus,” a nickname given to it by late CEO Steve Jobs, is up and coming. The massive Cupertino, California facility will support 12,000 employees and assumes a monstrous 2.8 million square feet of land, some of which was purchased from Hewlett Packard. The new campus will compliment one already in existence at 1 Infinite Loop.
The new campus boasts a thousand-seat auditorium and 300,000 square feet dedicated just to Research and Development. The structure encompasses 176 acres and cost $5 billion to build. Several aerial videos shot by drone have flown over and around the site several times this year, beginning in January, to show progress on the building and a series of astounding before-and-after shots. The structure will be more than a mile around and features underground parking.
According to MacWorld, the building has a lot of other neat features, too. Enormous walls of glass will allow employees to look out and bring the outside in. The inside of the building will allegedly be special, too: the interior will be crafted from a specific kind of maple trees, from which only the fine “heartwood” will be used. The interior will certainly be beautiful, if not entirely economic.
Speaking of economics, the campus will also power itself 100 percent via renewable energy and will be outfitted with solar panels all around so the building will be as efficient as something of its size can be—which is a lot, given the amount of actual enclosed area. “It’s more sustainable, it’s more economic, it’s more interesting,” says founder and chairman of architectural firm Foster+Partners, Norman Foster.
The building, called Apple Campus 2, is not on everyone’s happy list. Stakeholders have attacked the project and claimed it to be wildly extravagant, particularly as it will be located next to an Apple campus already in use. To be fair, the project has already ballooned $2 billion over its slated cost of $3 billion, and though it will use recycled water and promote healthy living with a huge fitness center and a thousand free-to-use bikes, the project does cost an obscene amount of money—even though $1 billion is less than 1 percent of Apple’s cash reserves.
The structure is set to open sometime in 2016. Setbacks delayed the project’s original completion time of July 2015.
