Apple's new headquarters by Foster + Parters

On Earth Day a new video of Apple’s green HQ

A newly leaked video stresses the Cupertino office's peerless environmental and design credentials

Scheduling complications might have pushed Apple’s new Norman Foster-designed headquarters opening date back to 2016, yet, even in two years time, the building will still look strikingly futuristic.

Just in time for Earth Day, an Apple video leaked online, giving us a little more insight into the circular Apple facility - dubbed the spaceship - that Steve Jobs hoped the architecture community would regard as the best office building in the world.

As we have reported in the past, the windows in this $5bn facility will be made from 40-ft panes of concave glass, the floors will be museum-quality terrazzo; the ceilings will be finished in polished concrete; while the interior wood is to be harvested from just one species of maple.

However, in the video, originally created for Cupertino City Council members and removed from YouTube by Apple's legal team on Tuesday evening (UK), the Apple's senior arborist, David Muffly, explains how in redeveloping the firm’s campus in Cupertino, the tech firm actually hope to reintroduce the kind of native species that once thrived in the region. 

 

Apple HQ

Meanwhile, Lisa Jackson, VP of environmental initiatives, explains that the new facility will run on entirely renewable energy sources, and that for 75 per cent of the year, it won’t even require artificial air conditioning, since the building will naturally ventilate itself.

In the video Lord Norman Foster describes the Stanford Campus as Steve Jobs’s key reference point. "The first point of reference I think for Steve was the campus at Stanford, his home territory, and also the landscape that he grew up with. He still remembered it as the fruit bowl of America."

 

Apple's new headquarters by Foster + Parters
Apple's new headquarters by Foster + Parters

Interestingly, Foster also says that the development didn’t begin as a circular office building in a campus setting, but became that during a long and complicated design process. 

"It didn't start as a circular building it really grew into that. So the idea of one building, with a great park, was borne out of a very intensive process with many models, many presentations, and that process continues today."

 

Apple's new headquarters by Foster + Parters
Apple's new headquarters by Foster + Parters

Once built, 80 per cent of the property will be parkland, helping Apple achieve its goal of contributing no net greenhouse gas emissions in the building of this new office. A worthy goal. 

Find out more about a designer who inspired Apple’s own creative supremo Johnny Ive  in As Little Design As Possible; for a view into a sustainable future, consider our own very green Jonathan Porritt book, The World We Made, and for other great examples of sustainable architecture both big and small check out Vitamin Green. As Apple CEO Tim Cook says in the video: "Now more than ever we will work to leave the world better than we found it."

 

Apple advert earth day