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Apple Park, also known as Apple Campus 2, is the corporate headquarters of Apple Inc., located in Cupertino, California, United States. It was opened to employees in April 2017, while construction was still underway. It replaced Apple Campus as the company's corporate headquarters.
The main building's scale and circular groundscraper design, by Norman Foster, has earned the structure the media nickname "the spaceship". Located on a suburban site totaling , it houses more than 12,000 employees in one central four-story circular building of approximately . Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted the campus to look less like a business park and more like a Nature park; 80 percent of the site consists of green space planted with drought-resistant trees and plants indigenous to the Cupertino area, and the center courtyard of the main building features an artificial pond.
Purchases of the needed properties were made through the company Hines Interests, which in at least some cases did not disclose the fact that Apple was the ultimate buyer; Philip Mahoney, a partner with a local commercial real estate brokerage, noted that this is common practice in attempts to arrange the purchase of contiguous land made up of multiple parcels with separate owners, in order to keep costs from skyrocketing and not reveal the company's plans to competitors. Among the sellers of the properties were SummerHill Homes (a plot of ) and Hewlett-Packard (three buildings of their campus in Cupertino).
Until April 2008, Apple had not sought the necessary permits to begin construction, so it was estimated that the project would not be ready in 2010 as originally proposed; however, the buildings on the site were held by Apple for its operations. In November 2010 the San Jose Mercury News revealed that Apple had bought an additional no longer used by HP, just north across Pruneridge Ave. This space had been the HP campus in Cupertino before it was relocated to Palo Alto.
On June 7, 2011, Jobs presented to the Cupertino City Council details of the architectural design of the new buildings and their surroundings. He did not live to see construction begin, dying a few months later on October 5.
On October 15, 2013, Cupertino City Council unanimously approved Apple's plans for the new campus after a six-hour debate. Shortly thereafter, demolition work began to prepare the site for construction.
Originally expected to break ground in 2013 and open in 2015, the project was delayed and started in 2014. On February 22, 2017, Apple announced that the official name of the campus would be "Apple Park", and the auditorium would be named the "Steve Jobs Theater".
The campus opened for workers in April 2017, despite continued construction work. This was followed by the first event in the Steve Jobs Theater, which took place on September 12, 2017. The Apple Park Visitor Center opened two months and five days later, on November 17, 2017.
As a consequence of the construction of Apple Park in the area, surrounding streets have seen increased tourism as well as rising real estate values, due to Apple employees' desire to live near their workplace.
The ring-shaped building, advertised as "a perfect circle", was not originally planned as such. The inner rim and outer rim on each floor are left open as walkways. There are eight buildings, separated by nine mini-atria. The campus is in circumference, with a diameter of . The one circular building houses most employees. It is four stories above the ground and three stories underground. Apple created life-size mock-ups of all parts of the building to analyze any design issues.
The campus design places the roads underground. Cars are parked underground and in two multistory parking garages. The campus uses only glass for its walls and views of the inner courtyard as well as of the landscape facing the exterior of the building. Around of space is for meetings and breakout spaces in the building. The inner part of the circular building contains a park featuring a pond, with fruit trees and winding pathways inspired by California fruit orchards.
Apple brought to the construction project the same "fanatical attention to detail" which the company is famous for lavishing upon its products. Apple insisted on extraordinarily tight tolerances, even for parts of the structure normally hidden from view. Construction workers were often required to wear gloves to minimize accidental damage to surfaces. All interior wood used for furniture was harvested from a certain species of maple, with Apple working with construction companies from 19 countries for designs and materials.
A breathing, hollow concrete slab acts as floor, ceiling, and HVAC system. A total of 4,300 such slabs were used. Some of the slabs weigh .
The facade panes are produced by Bavarian companies Josef Gartner and Sedak. The latter company is a subsidiary of Seele GmbH; Apple had previously worked with Seele, an expert on glass facades, for some of its more prominent Apple Stores such as the one on Fifth Avenue in New York City. David Nicholl and Partners delivered the M&E works.
The sports tables and benches resemble those in .
The theater plays host to many types of events, from Apple Events such as product announcements, WWDC (Apple's Developers Conference), and shareholder's meetings, to special Apple Music events, such as performances by Billie Eilish and Ludovico Einaudi.
The theater's lobby has cylindrical-shaped glass walls and no support columns, which give an unhindered 360-degree view of the surrounding campus. The carbon fiber roof, made of 44 identical panels, was supplied by the Dubai-based company, Premier Composite Technologies. Each panel is long and wide and locks in the middle with the other panels. It is the largest carbon-fiber roof and the largest glass-supported structure in the world.
The theater also includes a high glass elevator that rotates 171 degrees from the bottom floor to the upper lobby level. The elevator is made from chemically tempered glass, and is considered to be the tallest free-standing glass elevator in the world.
The theater's first press event was held on September 12, 2017, where the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, Apple Watch Series 3 and Apple TV 4K were announced.
There are 2,000 parking spaces in the subterranean parking garage. The parking is managed by sensors and apps, which manage the traffic and parking spaces.
In 2011, Apple hired an arborist, Dave Muffly, to cultivate California's natural environment around Apple Park. Apple's headhunters tracked down Muffly in 2010 after Jobs recognized the quality of the oak trees near the Stanford Dish and asked staff to find the arborist who was caring for them.
There are 9,000 trees on the Apple Park campus, of 309 varieties of indigenous species. The planted trees are Oak savanna, Oak wood, and fruit trees including apple, apricot, plum, cherry, and persimmon. An additional are used for a grassland. Among the apple varieties represented are Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Gravenstein, and Cripps Pink, but the McIntosh is notably absent, due to its incompatibility with the area's climate.
After he began work in earnest, Muffly realized that fewer than a hundred of the 4,000 existing trees were usable. This meant he had to procure from scratch almost all of the 9,000 planned trees. His team went so far as to search abandoned Christmas tree farms, and Apple bought one at Yermo in the Mojave Desert.
Eventually, Apple agreed to keep the barn on the property and is using it to "store maintenance tools and other landscaping materials". The barn was disassembled during the campus construction and then reassembled in a different location from where it was originally located.
The headquarters also gained unfavorable attention when it emerged in 2018 that two workers had been injured and required hospital treatment after walking into the building's clear glass walls and doors.
Apple received some criticism for the perceived extravagance of its new headquarters, as well as its perfectionist approach to its design and construction. The use of special wood as a construction material was reported to be the subject of a 30-page guideline. The design of door handles was reported to be the subject of a one-and-a-half-year debate, involving several revisions before the Apple management gave its approval. Apple's desire for custom signage put the company at odds with the Santa Clara County Fire Department, requiring several rounds of negotiations due to fears it could compromise safety in case of emergencies.
In her book Brotopia, writer Emily Chang criticized Apple Park for having no daycare facilities for employees' children, despite it ostensibly serving the needs of every individual.
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