Apple Campus - Concept Design

Year: 2012 - 2016

The new Apple Campus will sit on a 176-acre plot in the South Bay city of 60,000. The massive donut of a building is the jewel of the campus - a 4 storey ring with 13,000 engineers and designs under one roof. Foster and Partners architects working on the project summed the building up as "one of the most environmentally sustainable projects on this scale anywhere in the world." The plan is for the facility to run entirely on renewable energy, drawing largely from on-site fuel cell plants and rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Natural ventilation and radiant cooling mean that the spaceship won't need air conditioning for some 70 percent of the year. Despite the mothership's sustainable credentials, though, the greenest part of the development isn't even the building itself â€" it's everything surrounding it - "an ecologically rich oak savanna reminiscent of the early Santa Clara Valley." Norman Foster says that Jobs wanted the campus to evoke the California of his childhood, one he "still remembered...as the fruit bowl of America."