BUILDING A HOME

Jobs was as aware as anybody that, if you are going to spend a lot of time and energy on hiring the best people and blending them into a winning team, you would be foolish not to invest in giving them the perfect physical environment in which to thrive. Even in the early days of Apple, Jobs strove to make the premises as conducive to professionalism and creativity as money would allow.

Since 1993, Apple’s corporate headquarters has been the Apple Campus, at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California – an area with Apple associations going back to the late 1970s. Built by the Sobrato Development Company, the Campus covers some 850,000 square feet, though Apple bought up a number of other buildings throughout Cupertino to accommodate its ever-growing workforce. With large areas of landscaped greenery, and as its name suggests, the Campus feels more like a university than corporate head offices: a place for creative minds to explore their boundaries.

But the Campus was simply not big enough to cope with the expansion of the company’s operations during Jobs’ second tenure. He set his mind to creating Apple Campus 2, announcing plans for the new development in Cupertino in April 2006. It is of typically visionary design, with Norman Foster + Partners – the architecture firm responsible for such iconic projects as the Reichstag redevelopment in Berlin, the Millennium Bridge in London and the Capital International Airport in Beijing – commissioned to draw up the plans. What emerged was a spaceship-like, circular glass-and-metal construction that rises four storeys, big enough to house 13,000 employees and with a strong focus on environmental sustainability.

As well as office space and research and development facilities, there are to be extensive green spaces, a 1,000-seat theatre, gym facilities, an electricity-generating plant to power it all, and even an orchard – a nod to Apple’s roots. For Jobs, it was simply ‘the best office building in the world’. With an estimated cost of half a billion dollars, this was never a project to be rushed and, sadly, building had yet to begin by the time of Jobs’ death. It is unlikely to be ready before 2016. Nonetheless, it is set to serve as a fitting monument to Jobs’ vision of how a business should operate.