Apple Proposes New Campus Headquarters in Cupertino that looks like Spaceship

Apple Proposes New Campus Headquarters in Cupertino that looks like Spaceship

Apple has proposed a new headquarters that is a perfect circle, four stories tall and houses 12,000 workers. Gone are the parking lots and taken underground, and more trees for freshness.

Steve Jobs described the new campus as a landed spaceship to the Cupertino City Council Tuesday night.

This circular campus would be built on top of a former Hewlett-Packard property that was acquired. The area to be renovated is some 150 acres and the campus design would increase green space and landscaping by 350 percent.

According to Jobs, if Cupertino doesn't approve the project, he will move his entire company to some place like Mountain View.

The following is a transcript of Jobs' opening remarks at the council presentation:

[TIMESTAMP :50] - ... Apple's grown like a weed, as you know, we've always been in Cupertino. We started in a little office park, and eventually got the buildings we are in now, corner of De Anza and 280, but we've, and those buildings maybe hold 2600 people, 2800 people.

2:25 - But we've got almost 12,000 people in the area - so we're renting buildings, not very good buildings, either (laughing); at an ever-greater radius from our campus. We're putting people in those. And it's clear that we need to build a new campus, so we're just out of space. And that doesn't mean we don't need the one we've got, we do need it, but we need to augment it.

2:58 - And so we've got a plan that lets us stay in Cupertino, and we went out and bought some land, and this land is kind of special to me.

I, When I was 13 i think, I called up Hewlett and Packard, they were my idols, and I called up Bill Hewlett, because he lived in Palo Alto, and there were no unlisted numbers in the phone book, which, gives you a clue to my age.

And he picked up the phone, and I talked to him, and I asked him if he would give me some spare parts for something I was building, called a frequency counter, and he did, but in addition to that, he gave me something way more important, he gave me a job that summer.

A summer job at Hewlett/Packard, right here in Santa Clara, off 280, with the division that built frequency counters.

Right around that exact moment in time, Hewlett and Packard themselves were walking along some property here in Cupertino, on Pruneridge, and they ended up buying it, and they built their computer systems division there, and as Hewlett/Packard has been shrinking lately, they decided to (sell) that property, and we bought it.

We bought that, and we bought some adjacent property, and it all used to be apricot trees, and orchards, and we've got about 150 acres - and we would like to put a new campus on that, so that we can stay in Cupertino.

And we've hired some great architects to work with, some of the best in the world, I think. And we've come up with a design that puts 12,000 people in one building.

When you think about that, that's rather odd -- 12,000 people in one building, but we've seen these, these office parks with lots of buildings and they get pretty boring pretty fast, so we want to do something better than that, and I'd like to take you through what we'd like to do.

So this is supposed to work, here, there we go. Can you see this?

[Slides]

So, here's where we are today - which is, uh, on the intersection at De Anza; and what we've done, we've bought this land right here, we tried to buy the apts in the corner, but they're not for sale. We bought everything else. And the campus we'd like to build there, is one building that holds 12 thousand people and it's a pretty amazing building; it's a little like a spaceship landed, but there it is, and it's got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle, and a lot more.

It's a circle, so it's curved all the way around, and if you've built something, you know it's not the cheapest way to build something. There's not a straight piece of glass on this building, and we've used our experience making retail buildings, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world, for architectural use - and we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curved all the way around the building. It's pretty cool.

Today, about 20% of the space is landscaping, most of it is big asphalt parking lots. We want to completely change this and make 80% of it landscaping. And the way we're going to do this - we're going to put most of the parking underground. And you can see what we have in mind. Today there are 37-hundred trees on the property, we'd like to almost double that.