Full transcript
The Ring You Cannot Walk Into
Apple Park is a four-story glass ring in Cupertino holding 12,000 people, and you cannot go inside it. What the public gets is one building across the street: the Apple Park Visitor Center at 10600 North Tantau Avenue, with a store, a cafe, and a roof terrace aimed straight at the ring. Everything beyond the security plaza east of North Wolfe Road is for employees and credentialed visitors only. That covers the 2.8 million square feet of offices, the 2 miles of walking paths, the orchard, the pond and the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater. The terrace is as close as anyone without a badge gets, and it costs nothing. Walk straight up to it when you arrive, before the store fills and the best corner of the railing is taken.
June 7, 2011
The campus was pitched in public exactly once, by Steve Jobs. On June 7, 2011 he stood up at a Cupertino City Council meeting and described a ring holding 12,000 employees in a single building. He called it a spaceship. He said there was not a straight piece of glass in it — all of it curved, all the way around. He wanted the trees on the site doubled and an apricot orchard put back, the kind that covered this valley when he was a boy. He said Apple would move in by 2015. He died four months later, on October 5, 2011. The council approved the project unanimously in October 2013, after a hearing that ran more than six hours. Count the floors of the ring from the terrace: four, exactly as he described them.
Not a Straight Piece of Glass
He was right about the glass, and it was expensive to be right. The ring is clad in the largest panels of curved glass ever made, fabricated by seele, the German firm Apple has used for its stores for years. The facade follows a radius of 232 meters, so every pane had to be bent to that one arc. The extreme case is the pair of curved sliding doors on the main restaurant: each weighs 180 metric tons, stands 16 meters tall and 28 meters wide, rides on a track cut to the building's radius, and takes 12 minutes to open. Those doors sit on the far side of the ring, out of sight from here. Compare the curve of the glass over your head with the curve of the ring behind it — one drawing, two radii.
The Building With Almost No Air Conditioning
Apple calls the ring the largest naturally ventilated building in the world, and projects that it needs no heating or air conditioning for 9 months of the year. Air moves through the concrete floor slabs, which soak up the night's cool and give it back over the day. The roof carries 17 megawatts of solar panels, and the campus runs entirely on renewable energy. The before-and-after is the part worth knowing. The site Apple bought had 9,220 surface parking spaces and 42 acres of permeable ground; the finished campus has over 9,000 trees and about 5 million square feet less asphalt and concrete. Check the ring's roof from the terrace for air-conditioning plant and see how little there is to find.
The Model, and Whether It Is There
The thing most people come inside for is a large scale model of the whole campus, set on a table so that it appears to float. Foster + Partners had it milled and finished on the same machines that cut Apple's own products. From 2017 you could hold an iPad over it and watch the roof lift away, the floors separate, the seasons turn. Then in July 2026 Apple shut that room. The notice reads: please pardon our appearance while we improve our store, and during this time the Exhibition Space is temporarily closed. No reopening date has been published. The store, the cafe, the roof terrace and the Apple Vision Pro demos all run as normal. Ask at the door whether the Exhibition Space is back before you build a trip around it.
What the Terrace Is Made Of
The Visitor Center earns a minute of attention on its own account. Foster + Partners designed it as well, and it opened to the public in November 2017. Its roof is carbon fiber, cantilevered out over the outdoor seating on both sides, and it rests on two stone-clad cores with nothing else holding it up. The terrace above is shaded by a screen of thin curved carbon-fiber fins. Stone walls, terrazzo floors and sculptural stairs repeat the palette of the building it faces. Stand in the middle of the ground floor and try to find a column.
What Was Here Before
None of this was built on empty land. Ninety-eight acres of this site were Hewlett-Packard's Cupertino campus, bought in 2010, and Jobs had history there: as a teenager he telephoned Bill Hewlett to ask for spare parts, and talked his way into a summer job building frequency counters. HP's buildings came down before the ring went up. The site held 4,844 employees at the end; the ring was designed for 12,000. Apple also asked the city to erase a road. Most of Pruneridge Avenue was formally vacated so the campus could be one continuous secure parcel, and a bus route had to be rerouted onto Vallco Parkway and North Tantau Avenue. Look at a map before you leave and find where Pruneridge Avenue now stops dead.