Apple's new mothership HQ gets visualised
The first glimpses of Apple's new proposed Cupertino HQ appeared the other month, but now more images have appeared courtesy of Techcrunch
The new building, known as Campus 2, will take up 2.8 million square feetm contain a 1,000 seat auditorium and research facilities civering 300,000 square feet.
Currently the building, which vaguely resembles an alien mothership, is working its way through the local planning process for the Cupertino city council. It's so important to Apple though, that Steve Jobs himself attended the preliminary planning hearing to address the authorities.
Images of the new headquarters are below which is set in extensive woodland with 6,000 trees, up from the 3,700 on the site currently, covering 175 acres close to the 280 highway and has extensive underground parking to help with the overall aesthetics. I think you'll agree with me that it's certainly pretty and resembles a University campus.
There are definite advantages for staff to having everything in one large building too, and this is a style that Apple have copied from world famous security centres including the Pentagon and GCHQ in the UK.
Jobs said at the planning meeting that the company's current base houses only 2,800 people and isn't big enough. The company currently rents offices nearby for its other 6,700 staff. The new building with augment, and not replace its current campus facility. The new building will be built on land former occupied by a Hewlet Packard office.
There's no word yet on when construction might start or the company will be able to move into the new building though they hope to be able to move 12,000 employees into the new site in 2015. It's still possible, though unlikely, that changes will need to be made to the plans to satisfy the planning authorities before this happens though as they say they are currently assessing any environmental impact of the plans.
Looks very nice, wouldn’t mind working there :) Wonder if they’re ever going to manage to build it to their timeframe, I suspect it’d take longer than they would think.
Interesting. It reminds me of a wagon train ‘circled up’ against an enemy attack. A rather appropriate look for Apple when you think about it.
And look – inside the impenetrable outer wall there’s an inner circle too! Wow…this just keeps looking more and more appropriate.
All that’s missing is a crocodile infested moat and a chained dragon near the entrance. ;-)
It looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere…bad for commute? And if it’s more space for employees they need, why waste so much of the inner circle region o_0
In order to enter you first have to be logged into iTunes.