New images of Apple’s Campus 2 building show amazing detail [Gallery]

Reliable sources recently provided 9to5Mac with official blueprints of Apple Campus 2 that detail and illustrate the mammoth project currently in development. (These are just a few of the confidential images.)

The spaceship-like building, called “Campus 2,” is nearly a mile in circumference. Apple bought the land from HP and other neighbors in Cupertino, Calif., for around $300 million. The company’s late cofounder, Steve Jobs, oversaw the building’s design, while the project’s proposal was his last public appearance (video below).

Solar panels cover the main building’s entire roof, and the images above depict additional outdoor and indoor aspects of the new structure. The exclusive slides named Foster + Partners as one of the architecture firms working on the project, and they cited Arup for consulting engineering, OLIN for landscape architecture, and Davis Langdon for construction. Previous reports indicated that construction is supposed to start later this year.

In related news: Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer sent neighbors brochures recently to solicit feedback on the project.

previous 9to5Mac gallery featured 100 other high-quality images, and one of the highlights was an auditorium that Apple plans to give presentations at when the facilities open in 2015.

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New Apple HQ has a bigger footprint than the Pentagon, almost mile in circumference

John Martellaro at MacObserver got his protractor out and used those drawings that the City of Cupertino released this weekend to extrapolate the real size of Apple’s new HQ building.  In a word, it is BIG.

Given that comforting sanity check, I measured the diameter of the Apple spaceship as 1615 ft, plus or minus a few ft., depending on where one places the ruler. That’s a radius of 807.5 ft.

The outside measurement on the plans is 760′ but the large outside shader structures could account for the additional size.

Interestingly, that is a bigger footprint than the world’s largest office building, the Pentagon, which at five stories tall, two basement levels and with a smaller courtyard, still has significantly more usable square footage.

Also (using our geometry skillz) plugging the 1615 ft diameter into a perfectly round circle, you get an outside circumference of just under a mile (5074 ft).  That means taking some paperwork all the way to HR might be a lunch killer.

Update: Obama Pacman notes that Apple could install 3 full sized Football fields in the courtyard (below). Read more