Every architectural masterpiece has a time it was just a dream in the minds of its maker and every well-built structure always has the makings of being well thought out.
Five years after the death of Steve Jobs, his final masterpiece; the apple park has finally become a reality.
Apple’s brand-new headquarters in Silicon Valley has every amenity under the sun, except air conditioning.
The reported $5 billion Apple Park is a reality, complete with a 2.8 million-square-foot main office called “The Ring” with natural ventilation, two-story yoga room and all the meticulous add-ons the detail-oriented Jobs imagined for the site, according to Wired magazine.
Jobs’ fingerprints are all over the massive, glass-enshrined and tree-lined campus in Cupertino, California, based on photos in the magazine’s June issue that hit newsstands Tuesday, the New York Post reports.
A good view of the building showed it was clearly one of his visionary masterpieces with his attention to detail so deep, it went all the way down to the custom door handles to the type of wood used in the offices.
“He knew exactly what timber he wanted, but not just ‘I like oak’ or ‘I like maple.’ He knew it had to be quarter-cut. It had to be cut in the winter, ideally in January, to have the least amount of sap and sugar content. We were all sitting there, architects with grey hair, going, ‘Holy shit!’” recalled Behling.
For its offices, Apple instead turned to custom timber veneer from recycled wood and installed height-adjustable desks with brackets to hide electrical wires.
The Apple visionary despised air conditioning and fans but didn’t want his employees opening windows either, so he insisted on installing a natural ventilation system in “The Ring.”
“The flaps and the opening mechanism all have to relate to sensors that measure where the wind is coming from and how the air goes through it,” said Stefan Behling, one of the project leads.
The concrete floors are lined with tubes of water that are supposed to keep temperatures between 68 and 77 degrees — allowing for the heating and cooling system to turn on only when needed.
“It’s not like we’re asking people to be uncomfortable at work. We’re asking them to recognise that part of being connected to the outside is knowing what temperature it is,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives.
“We don’t want you to feel like you’re in a casino. We want you to know what time of day it is, what temperature it is outside. Is the wind really blowing? That was Steve’s original intention, to sort of blur that line between the inside and outside. It sort of wakes up your senses,” she said.
There are 9,000 freshly planted trees on the property, giving it a walkable campus feel, a 100,000-square-foot wellness and yoga centre with stone-covered walls, and its cafeteria can fit 4,000 employees.
“If Steve could reappear, it would be as he conceived it when he last saw it as drawings,” said lead architect Norman Foster. “He’d find some of the details that were not addressed in his lifetime but I believe he’d approve them.”
“This was a hundred-year decision,” Cook added. “And Steve spent the last couple of years of his life pouring himself in here at times when he clearly felt very poorly. Could we have cut a corner here or there? It wouldn’t have been Apple. And it wouldn’t have sent the message to everybody working here every day that detail matters, that care matters.”