Steve Jobs’s ultimate creation is coming to life before our eyes: The Apple Campus 2. The newest drone footage from Duncan Sinfield shows the five-billion-dollar Campus 2 in striking detail. Construction is expected to wrap at the end of the year, and the new headquarters will open in early 2017. This footage proves that Apple is getting close. And it will make your eyes drool.
On Wednesday, Apple will host yet another grand event, presumably to unveil the iPhone 7 and a few other nifty gadgets and capabilities. But Apple will do so without Jobs, the master of intrigue, and the iPhone 7 will likely be the company’s most radical departure from the Jobsian design philosophy since his 2011 death. Fortunately, we can marvel at his true magnum opus.
The Apple Campus 2 will be the company’s new headquarters, based in Cupertino, California, and — when complete — will be the biggest office building in the world. Calling it an “office building,” or even a “large office building,” however, does injustice to the architectural and engineering feat. The structure is a circle, one mile in circumference, and beautifully simple in appearance despite its outrageous complexity in design. It’s an embodiment of Apple’s decades-old philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” And the new footage shows what will become the parts unseen — the hidden structural components, which Jobs agonized over. Beauty in design, for him, was never just superficial.
The circle’s center will be a 30-acre park, replete with trees, pathways, and a pond. Jobs, despite bearing partial responsibility for society’s addiction to technology, believed in face-to-face interaction. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he told Walter Isaacson for his biography. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
A rendering of the finished product.
So Apple employees, despite working in different slices of the Campus 2 pie, will ideally meet and chat up coworkers from other divisions in the park. If not in the park, they’ll have plenty more opportunities to come across their coworkers: The Apple Campus 2 will have seven cafeterias, a 100,000-square-foot wellness center, an enormous research and development center, and a 1,000-seat underground auditorium.
This underground auditorium will host future Apple unveilings, like the September 7 event. Jobs, who predicted that he would die too soon, wished to leave behind a company that would continue to walk in his shoes. With the Campus 2, Jobs’s Apple culture will subsist for some time to come. On Wednesday, as Jobs’s replacement — CEO Tim Cook — takes the stage, we will find out whether Apple’s products will likewise stay true to Jobs’s enlightened design and functionality mantras.
