The home of 12,000 Apple employees!

Bigger, better, Apple. If Apple builds, then in superlatives. In 2011, Apple founder Steve Jobs had presented the plans. In 2013 the Cupertino City Council approved the construction. Four years of construction and about 5 billion US dollars later, it is now finished: The new Apple Headquarter.The Apple Headquarter sits on 175 acres of land and is surrounded by vast green areas and parks. The circumference of the four-storey building is around a mile. Just the creation of jogging and cycling trails, as well as a fitness and wellness center, cost about 70 million US dollars.

1.23 million square meters of glass

The sliding glass doors along the outside of the café weight 440,000 pounds (200,000 kg). The opening and closing of the doors are controlled by an underground hidden mechanism. The 20-ton glass panes were produced by the Seele Group in Germany. The transport was difficult: the glass panes were shipped from Germany across the Atlantic Ocean and the Panama Canal to California. All in all, the campus has 900 slices of vertical glass, 1,600 slices of canopy glass, 510 slices of clerestory glass. The most massive pieces weigh over 3 tons.

4.300 concrete blocks

The structure of the building consists of 4,300 concrete blocks, which have a total weight of 212 tons. Each concrete block has an average size of 13 feet to 40 feet and is hollowed from the inside. This allows the air to circulate and the building "breathes" independently. The ring breathes air through the bottoms of the canopies. In other places, shafts, which act like chimneys, breathe the hot air out. Breathes, one of the 70 involved engineering teams, worked with experts in optimising the airflow of Formula One racing cars. Because of the self-ventilation conventional cooling becomes almost dispensable: in nine out of twelve months, neither heating nor air conditioning is needed.

80% independent power supply

In general, the new Apple Headquarter is a pioneer regarding energy saving! The energy required during the peak working time is generated by own renewable sources. Roof-mounted solar modules offer a capacity of 17 megawatts and are thus the primary energy provider of the campus. The rest needed will be provided by Monterey County and energy company First Solar.

9,000 trees

In addition to the architecture of the building, the contractors have also thought about landscape planning. Apple employees should be feeling outdoors. For this reason, some 9,000 trees were planted within the ring. Steve Jobs point of view was that there should always be more trees than developers in the Apple Headquarter.