In the latest drone flyover video of Apple’s under-construction Campus 2, this one sent in by Matthew Roberts, we get a close-up look at progress made in recent weeks on the new Apple headquarters set to open early next year.
Silicon Valley Business Journal reports that Apple has secured a deal to build another spaceship campus in Sunnyvale, California. The company will purchase Landbank Investments LLC’s planned Central & Wolfe campus which comes in at 777,000-square-feet at Central Expressway and Wolfe Road in Silicon Valley.
Apple has continued making lots of progress at its under construction Campus 2 site in Cupertino ahead of plans to move in late next year, evident by this latest drone flyover courtesy of our friend MyithZ.
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A new flyover of Apple’s under construction Campus 2 project in Cupertino, California gives us one of our closest look yet at the site. We also get our first detailed look at work started on Apple’s new auditorium on the campus where it plans to host events when the project is complete.
The video below comes courtesy of MyithZ who was able to get these shots from just 120ft up, much closer than previous drone flyovers and Apple’s own aerial shots.
Earlier this week it was reported that Apple had put a policy in place that would have prevented the company from hiring people who been convicted of felonies within the past seven years to aid in the construction of its new headquarters.
According to the original report, fewer than five people had actually been denied jobs because of their criminal backgrounds. Even so, union leaders sent letters to CEO Tim Cook at the beginning of the year asking for the policy to be lifted, but to no avail.
After drawing fire from unions and workers, Apple today reversed that decision and announced that it will hire those workers who were recently convicted of felonies.
[youtube https://youtu.be/9vy6M3qXbdQ]
The latest drone flyover of Apple’s under construction Campus 2 gives us our closest look yet at the site.
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Following the latest 4K drone flyover video we posted earlier this month, Apple has shared an updated aerial shot showing construction progress on its Campus 2 project in Cupertino. The new shot shows significant developments since last month’s official image.
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Image via KQED
Apple has continued to make steady progress on its new headquarters, and this week provided KQED News with a special “sneak peek” at the construction site. The news outlet has released several photos of some of the major structures on the upcoming campus, and has promised additional photos from the tour will be published later this month.
Last week we got an drone’s-eye view of the progress, which gave us our first look at some of these buildings. The new photos provide another point of view, showing the structures from the ground. This is the first time we’ve seen photos like this for the “spaceship” campus.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZTRTv56k58]
Following the latest drone flyover video of Apple’s under construction “Campus 2” last month, today we get an up-to-date look at progress over the last several weeks with another 4K video courtesy of Myithz.
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If you’ve been keeping up with the progress on Apple’s upcoming campus since our last check-in, you’ll definitely want to see the latest drone flyover video from Myithz, which boasts an impressive 4K look at the construction.
If you’ve picked up a 4K monitor (or 5K iMac!), you can check out the three-minute video in all of its high-res glory below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj8cI4G5_PQ&channel=myithz]
While the video above shows off some of the construction progress made since last checking in, Apple’s general project schedule remains the same for the project with street utilities and demolition work expected to finish this year, earthwork continuing into early 2015, and building construction into late 2016:
The new 176 acre Campus 2 is expected to hold approximately 12,000 Apple employees over 2.8M square feet after its completion. Currently Apple expects to wrap up building construction and begin moving employees in by the end of 2016 and into 2017.
Permit image via BuildZoom
By now you’ve probably heard about Apple’s ambitious new “spaceship” campus, which will serve as the company’s new headquarters once completed. While some details of the facility haven’t been revealed to the public, a new building permit uncovered by BuildZoom has given us an idea of how much money Apple will be spending on its new in-house auditorium.
The 1,000-seat theater is going to cost Apple somewhere around $161 million. It will be worth the money though, as it’s expected to be used for most product unveilings, and will give Apple even greater control over the keynote experience. It won’t be large enough to take over as the official WWDC venue, but for most other product launches it should work nicely.
After Tim Cook recently claimed at an environmental conference that its new ‘Spaceship’ headquarters would be “the greenest building on the planet,” Apple today provided (via Business Insider) a few illustrative facts and figures to support the claim.
For example, Cupertino law requires that construction sites reuse at least 75% of their demolished materials. Apple says it’s using over 90% of the old headquarters in building the new one.
This includes recycling all of the concrete from its present headquarters to form part of the foundations of the new campus. Trees cleared from the construction site are being turned into lumber for use in the building.
Once completed, Apple says that not only will 100 percent of its energy come from renewable sources (Apple is building a large solar farm at the site), but that the unique design of the structure means it will require far less energy to run than a conventional building.
The new HQ will also save money on heating and cooling. Apple says the building will have natural ventilation for 75% of the year.
While these are just a few snippits, we’re likely to hear more as construction work progresses.
Apple places a high priority on its environmental credentials, hiring former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to oversee environmental issues, building a dedicated microsite for environmental responsibility, releasing an Earth Day video narrated by Tim Cook, and running press ads calling on other companies to follow its example.
As we shared this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook today participated in the Climate Week NYC environment-focused conference to speak on behalf of Apple and the company’s efforts on preserving the planet. During his interview, Cook stated that Apple’s new headquarters will be what he thinks is the greenest building on the planet:
“We’re building a new headquarters that will, I think, be the greenest building on the planet. It’ll be a center for innovation, and it’s something clearly our employees want and we want.
Cook’s comments came in the context of discussing Apple’s efforts to monitor the environmental impact of the supply chain behind Apple’s products, not just Apple-operated facilities and improving the carbon footprint of other facilities. Cook echoed past comments by saying that Apple will focus on the supply chain “in a major way.”
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The 8-minute video, highlighted by Apple Spotlight and embedded below, shows the latest progress on Apple’s Campus 2. Although the spaceship site is cordoned off by high walls to prevent pictures at street level, a GoPro-equipped drone has no trouble getting the aerial shots seen in the video. Images of the campus were last seen in July…
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Following an update late last month from the City of Cupertino on progress being made at Apple’s currently under construction Campus 2 project, now the City has shared an official updated aerial photo of the site from Apple.
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Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt says that even at an international conference of 6,000 architects, he couldn’t find a single one who liked the spaceship design of Apple’s new campus building. Though if the single quote given is representative of the quality of the critiques, this may not be saying much.
“Does it have to be a spaceship?” asked an official at the American Institute of Architects.
Pixar president Ed Catmull wrote in his book Creativity Inc that they are failing to understand a key feature of the building, derived from a lesson Steve Jobs learned when leading the design of Pixar’s headquarters …
The first walls around Apple’s Campus 2 have begun to take shape, as noted by KCBS reporter Ron Cervi, in a tweet today. Previously, more photos from KCBS showed the site’s considerable excavation under way, and earlier photos from March detailed the demolition work of the former HP campus on the site, which was almost complete at that time.
Image via Mercury News
A San Jose Mercury News report reveals that Apple is planning to expand its operations to a new Sunnyvale, CA campus. At 290,000 square feet, the Sunnyvale Crossing is a bit smaller than Apple’s previous 350,000 square foot Sunnyvale expansion (though it has one more building than the previous expansion).
Apple is currently in the process of constructing its new “spaceship” headquarters, which is expected to be completed by 2016 and will help alleviate some of the need for these external campuses and allow the company to bring more of its corporate team together in one place. However, the lease on this new space is reportedly somewhere between 7-10 years, so it’s likely that Apple plans to continue using the space for quite some time.
In a tweet, KCBS reporter Ron Cervi shows the groundwork of Apple’s new ‘spaceship’ campus taking shape. Cervi often tweets from his reporting helicopter and caught this shot a few hours ago.
Last time we checked in with the site, it was in the midst of demolition. In this latest photo, the circular foundations of Apple Campus 2 (Apple’s official name for the project) are much more defined. Apple is expected to start new building work at some point this year. The campus is currently planned to open in 2016.
New aerial photos of the site of Apple’s new ‘spaceship’ campus now appear to show that demolition of the existing buildings is complete, with an army of construction vehicles at work preparing the ground for construction …
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As Apple’s Campus 2 site steadily progresses closer toward someday being complete, Architectural Record (via Mac Rumors) has shared a recent Q&A with architect Norman Foster, the designer responsible for the structure and appearance of the future campus. In the interview, Foster describes the evolution of the project and working with Steve Jobs on Apple’s Campus 2, which is currently in the midst of construction after being approved by the city of Cupertino just last fall…
Apple’s new ‘spaceship’ headquarters has been a long time in the coming, with Steve Jobs presenting the plans to the Cupertino city council back in 2011, but work has finally begun. KCBS eye-in-the-sky reporter Ron Cervi took the above Instagram photo, showing that demolition work on the site is now underway.
While we heard last month that the demolition phase was starting, this is the first visible evidence we’ve seen. Apple also recently constructed a full-size mockup of one small section of the building in order to test construction methods and enable the company to see how the concrete elements would look in real life …
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View of the main campus from the on-site auditorium building
Apple will receive the full set of building permits for its ‘spaceship’ campus in Cupertino today, following a formal approval vote by the full council. This final vote was just a rubber-stamping exercise, with the go-ahead effectively granted a month ago.
We have a pretty detailed idea of what to expect, thanks to a detailed scale model, project video and series of renders made available by Apple as part of its planning application.
It’s taken the company some time and work to reach this point. The company initially faced objections from local residents on environmental and traffic grounds, prompting CFO Peter Oppenheimer to send out a brochure to local residents to alleviate concerns, and the project is reportedly $2B over-budget. But work can now begin, with completion expected in 2015 or 2016.
You can watch the video of the full council meeting below.
New renders released by the City of Cupertino from Apple’s planning documents provide the most detailed view yet of what life inside the company’s new spaceship headquarters will be like.
Illustrating everything from cafes to car-parks, the renders are intended to provide a feel for what the building will be like to work in, rather than just its appearance as a structure. They also include additional renders of the upper level of the 1,000-seat auditorium.
Full gallery below …
