Apple To Move To Its New Headquarters … It ’ s The Best Office Building In The World | PHOTO

Cupertino looks like many other small, drab cities in
northern California, with serried houses and shopping
centres. Later this year, however, it will become the only
place to find Apple’s newest creation: the enormous ring
which will serve as the technology firm’s headquarters
(rendering pictured above) . Several months before he died
in 2011, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and the
mastermind of the project, predicted that the spaceship-
like structure would become “the best office building in
the world” and that people from everywhere would travel
to see it.
To prove Jobs right, around 13,000 construction
workers have laboured for years behind thick, high
walls. The site spans several city blocks. Earlier this
year, everything was hidden from view except cranes
and a huge sand pile that rose a few hundred feet high,
like the Great Pyramid of Giza. The scale of the project
rivals the ancient Egyptians’ monuments. Every piece of
glass on the four-storey exterior is curved, requiring
special panes to be made in Germany – the largest
pieces of curved glass ever manufactured. With a price
tag of around $5 billion, it may be the most expensive
corporate headquarters in history.
Jobs’s last public appearance was at a meeting of
Cupertino’s city council at which he requested approval
for the project. The building, which is designed by
Norman Foster, a British architect, is both an
ostentatious expression of Apple’s wealth and an
elegant shrine to Jobs’s vision. Huge swathes of green
space will sit within and outside the circular building,
recalling the lush orchards that blossomed in the area
when Jobs was a child. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief
designer, who helped craft the iPod and iPhone, has
overseen the particulars with the painstaking rigour he
applies to refining all the firm’s new gadgets.
“Silicon Valley is having its Versailles moment,” says
Louise Mozingo, a professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, and the author of a fine book called
“Pastoral Capitalism” about corporate headquarters.
Last year Facebook opened a new, 430,000-square-foot
building in Menlo Park designed to embody the
company’s informal culture. Resembling a giant
warehouse, it is reputedly the largest open-plan office in
the world. Meanwhile, Google is working on a zany idea
for a new headquarters to replace its Googleplex, which
involves constructing movable glass buildings. Other
technology companies, including Nvidia, Samsung and
Uber, will, collectively, spend well over $1 billion on new
buildings that broadcast their success. These ambitious
projects will transform a bland architectural landscape
of generic-looking office parks. But they also mark a
cultural shift for the Valley, whose ethos is to value
garages (in which firms like Hewlett-Packard and Apple
were born) over glitz.




Join bliszblog on BBM channels : C003452E0