New details about Apple’s multi-billion dollar circular “spaceship” campus have emerged. The Apple campus, currently under constructions, is supposedly just as futuristic inside as its amazing exterior.
Apple Campus under construction
Apple’s lead designer Jony Ive talked about the design of the new campus in a lengthy New Yorker profile, in which he said the floors and ceilings will comprise “forty-four hundred precast-concrete units that will have a floor on one side, a ceiling on the other, and a cooling system between them.”
They’re called void slabs which are currently being built in a special factory by Apple in nearby Woodland, California. “We’re assembling rather than building”, Ive said to The New Yorker.
The 4,400 concrete slabs are just one indication of Apple’s unbelievable attention to detail. The campus has in fact faced several days and increases in cost due to issues with fit and finish, in the most part due to the very strict requirements put in place by Steve Jobs, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
He apparently insisted that surface gaps were 1/32 of an inch instead of 1/8 of an inch (which is standard) and that polished concrete ceilings be moulded and hoisted into place so they maintain a uniform appearance, which “left one person involved in the project speechless.”
Thankfully, Ive has maintained Jobs’ attention to detail for the Apple campus, saying that he had a huge fight on his hands in terms of simplifying the Mitsubishi control panels on the elevators. He also had a large influence on the interior – such as staircases and signage.
When it is completed in 2016, Apple Campus 2, as it is now known, will boast curved glass panels on the outside, an underground auditorium and a panoramic view of nature, which is being extensively restored to its former natural beauty.
“This is something that Steve cared about passionately”, Ive said to The New Yorker. “There is a bittersweetness here, because this is obviously about the future, but every time I come here it makes me think of the past as well — and just the sadness. I just wish he could have seen it”.
Larry Banks is a keen follower of technology and finance. He has worked for a variety of online publications, writing about a diverse range of topics including mobile networks, patents, and Internet video delivery technologies.