After being under construction for nearly five years, the Apple Campus 2 is finally nearing completion; overall construction is expected to be finish by the end of this year with the opening scheduled for sometime in 2017.
The iconic structure, designed by Foster+Partner, which is similar to that of a UFO in design has only been seen through the windows of airplanes and drone footage, as well as the pre-rendered stills that showed us the finished project. But Mashable were recently given exclusive photos about the facility and a trope of details to match.
We know the length Apple goes to create a perfect product, such as employing more than 800 people to work on the camera for its iPhones. The same dogma applies here. The project a massive undertaking, one that will be heralded as a feat of engineering & architecture for years to come, requiring the recruitment of design firms, material suppliers and other vendors from 19 countries spanning the globe.
One such company is the German-based Seele/Sedak who also designed the Apple Store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The company created the curved, structural glass that is used across Apple Campus 2, as well as the exterior and interior glazing and canopies. They also designed the huge glass cylinder walls for the “Theatre”.
The Theatre itself was a better kept secret than most of Apple Campus 2. Submerged, the 120,000 -square-feet facility has the capacity to seat 1,000 people. It isn’t all underground; you can see the cylinder-shaped lobby at ground level which is bare of columns, offering a 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape through the glass walls to visitors before they head down the stairs and into the auditorium.
But what’s most iconic about the lobby of the Theatre isn’t the glass walls, but the roof. And perhaps that’s because it was designed in Dubai and as a result easily impresses. Apple believes it to be the largest freestanding carbon-fiber roof ever made and it was created by Dubai-based Premier Composite Technologies. Added to the Theatre last month, the roof (which weighs 80 tons) was first built and tested in Dubai before the individual pieces that make it were shipped to Cupertino. Each of the 44 radial panels that make up the roof average 70 feet in length and 11 feet in width, with each connecting to a small central hub positioned in the middle. What’s more, the solar panels which cover the roof of the main building were also made and tested in Dubai.
In total, nearly a third (900) of the 3000 glass panels have already been installed across the facility, but the panels which measure at 46 feet long and 10.5 across won’t be biggest piece of crystalware at the venue. At the entrance to its on-campus restaurant two gargantuan glass doors that span four stories high (92 x 52 feet) will serve as the entrance, and in truth be a proclamation to Apple’s prowess. It’s natural that employees will work up quite the appetite after a day of coding, designing and testing and as a result the restaurant itself is enormous, taking up nearly 60,000 feet of space, ensuring seating for 2,800 people at capacity with the outdoor patio being able to host another 1,200.
The main building itself will stand four stories above ground and will reach a further three below ground and span over 2.8 million square feet. The diameter of the whole complex is 1,520 feet with the circumference measuring more than a mile in length.
Custom made machines had to be engineered to help with the construction; christened “manipulators”, the giant machines have suction cups that lift and place the 900 curved glass panels. The machines are being used to build both the main building (which will house 13,000 employees) as well as the “Theatre”.
Source: Mashable
