Apple’s “spaceship campus” is a “futuristic campus built with astonishing attention to detail,” according to Reuters. The price tag for the project is estimated at $5 billion with more than $1 billion allocated for the interior of the building alone (though Apple hasn’t confirmed these figures).
What’s so astonishing about the project. Here are some tidbits, according to Reuters:
- When completed, the campus will house up to 14,200 employees.
- The main building boasts the world’s largest piece of curved glass and will be surrounded by a lush canopy of thousands of trees. No vents are pipelines are reflected in the glass.
- Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building totaled some 30 pages.
- Tolerances, the distance materials may deviate from desired measurements, were a particular focus. On many projects, the standard is 1/8 of an inch at best; Apple often demanded far less, even for hidden surfaces.
- The project generated about 13,000 full-time construction jobs.
- The elevator buttons strike some workers as resembling the iPhone’s home button; one former manager even likened the toilet’s sleek design to the smartphone.
- Apple demanded the doorways be perfectly flat with no threshold.
- Apple wanted all signs to reflect its sleek, minimalist aesthetic, but the fire department needed to ensure the building could be swiftly navigated in an emergency.
The new campus, which will supplement and not replace Apple’s current headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, was a pet project of the late Steve Jobs. It’s a four-story, 2.8 million square foot building to be built on land formerly occupied by Hewlett Packard’s campus.
