Apple wants to build a new corporate headquarters that, in Chief Executive Steve Jobs’s own words, looks “a little like a spaceship.”
A day after the company unveiled its new web-based service iCloud, Mr. Jobs spoke at a Cupertino, Calif., city council meeting to pitch plans for a new Apple corporate campus on 150 acres of land, much of which used to belong to Hewlett-Packard.
Steve Jobs told the Cupertino City Council,
“Apple has grown like a weed.”
Steve then explained how the company’s current Cupertino headquarters only holds about a quarter of the 12,000 employees it has in the area.
A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on Mr. Jobs’s presentation.
Mr. Jobs’s affinity for aesthetically pleasing designs and attention to details were evident in the proposal that he laid out. The new office will be a round four-story building with a big courtyard in the middle. The futuristic design doesn’t have “a single straight piece of glass in the building” and it hides much of the parking underground, so there’s 90% less surface parking, according to the plan Mr. Jobs outlined. Not content merely to add four times more landscaping than the space current has, Apple hired an arborist from Stanford to put in indigenous trees, including apricot orchards, he said.
The campus, which Apple aims to build by 2015, will also include a 3,000-person capacity “café”, an auditorium, fitness center and R&D buildings, he said.
Mr. Jobs told city council members,
“We have a shot at building the best office building in the world. Architecture students will come here to see this.”
According to former Apple employees, the new corporate campus is long overdue. As Mr. Jobs explained at the council meeting, Apple outgrew its headquarters building years ago, forcing it to rent buildings nearby to accommodate all of its staff. That has had an impact on Apple’s culture, these people say. One example is how the current cafeteria is perpetually crowded, they say, forcing those who work away from the main office to go elsewhere for lunch. That cuts down on the kind of spontaneous discussions that used to take place between colleagues in different divisions that led to some of the company’s most inspired ideas, they say.
Judging from the open adoration of many of the city council members, it’s unlikely that Apple will face opposition to its plans. Mr. Jobs, however, took no chances. In answer to a question about how Cupertino could benefit from Apple’s plans, he noted Apple’s status as the city’s largest tax payer, suggesting that if it wasn’t able to execute its plans it would have to move to another location.
“If we can’t then we have to go somewhere like Mountain View, and we’d take our current people with us and give up and over the years sell the land here,” he said.
COMMENTARY: The unveiling of iSpaceship is classic Steve Jobs, and consistent with "The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs", a book by Carmine Gallo, which reveals his 7 principles of successful innovation, and required reading for all entrepreneurs and innovators. iSpaceship definitely has "Put a dent in the Universe", Principle #2.
I have always suspected that Steve Jobs is not from Earth, and iSpaceship is actually his "Mothership", something I wrote about in a previous blog post dated March 3, 2011, about his ties with the alien technology and true source of his vision and innovation. You be the judge.
The design of iSpaceship's spherical shape provides space that not only fits more people onto the current plot of land, but manages to create 350% more green space in the process. Apple's new headquarters, if approved, will be fueled by its own low-emissions power plant and will use grid power only in the event of an on site emergency.
The spherical shape of iSpaceship allows for more windows than a square shaped building and therefore more ambient light, so those 12,000 employees won’t constantly be clicking on their light switches. Jobs and team plan to add 60% more trees to the landscape and have hired a top arborist from Stanford to help make sure those plants are all indigenous. The building is only four stories high and to help minimize surface parking on the space by 90% — there is a huge asphalt lot there now — the Apple team is putting most of their parking underneath the structure.
As for for the building, Jobs said,
“We deal with people sitting at computers all day writing software. If power goes out on the grid, we get to send everybody home. So we have to have backup power to power the place in the event of brown outs.”
Solution, Apple plans to build their own energy center on site that will be powered by natural gas “and other clean sources” which will be their main source of power with the Cupertino grid acting as their backup system. Let’s hope those “other clean sources” make up a lot of this new spaceship campus’ power as we all know natural gas isn't the best thing in the world.
If I were to make a wild guess, the "natural gas and other clean sources" of power for iSpaceship sound suspiciously like the Bloom Box's from Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy uses natural gas and solid oxide fuel cells to generate electricity. The first Bloom Box was installed at Google's headquarters.
In a previous blog post dated December 25, 2010, it was rumored that Apple's future world headquarters located on the same 150 acres in Cupertino, would be designed by Norman Foster, founder of Foster + Partners, a world renowned architectural firm. Apple's rumored world headquarters was dubbed "City of Apple", and modeled after Foster + Partners’ carbon-neutral Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which is currently under construction. Although Foster + Partners was not named as the architect, Foster is one of the few architects in the world that could conceive and design something like iSpaceship. More pictures about iSpaceship are available on Habitat.
Courtesy of an article dated June 8, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal's Digits
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