Apple Campus Approved In Unanimously In Cupertino
It's official: the "spaceship campus" is ready to roll as the Cupertino City Council lends their unanimous approval of the Apple project at their October meeting. This month has already shown off a couple of views of the upcoming beast of an architectural project – now Apple can celebrate the initiation of the building itself. One move remains, of course, that being the second public reading of the formal agreement between Apple and the City of Cupertino, this scheduled for November 19th, with the full set of Apple's permits ready to hit the books the day after.
This ring of a campus will be rolling out with 2.8 million square feet of space to be constructed over a number of years starting in the near future. This beast of a piece of architecture will be working with a 100,000 square foot fitness center, space underground for a cool 2,400 vehicles for parking, and another parking lot for 6,000 more vehicles. More impressive-sounding numbers abound, this is only the first phase of construction – the second will make with an additional 600,000 square feet of office buildings and research and development buildings.
Below you'll find the last meeting held with the Cupertino City Council before their decision session taking place this week. This video shows an Apple presentation of the campus starting in at around 1:04, followed by quite a few numbers to back up the project.
You'll find a complete history of the new facility (with a few minor oddities in the feed) in SlashGear's campus search portal, if you please. There you'll find news bits leading all the way back to Steve Jobs original introduction to the facility back in June of 2011. Several of the quotes you've heard above come from the presentation by Jobs here – have a peek at that video right now while you're at it.
Fast forward to December of 2011 and the first renderings of the campus were revealed – many of those drawings having appeared numerous times since. Now we're in the phase that, if this were a major motion picture, would be like flying all the actors in to start talking about the script, collecting all the equipment, and getting ready to schedule the first shoots.
"It's a pretty amazing building. It's a little like a spaceship landed. It's got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle... It's a circle. It's curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something.
There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It's all curved. We've used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building...
It's pretty cool." – Steve Jobs
Above you'll also find the first real introduction to the campus as spoken by Steve Jobs as well – "it's pretty cool" really sums it up nicely. Stick around and see how this lovely bit of building makes its way towards reality in the years to come.