A Site To Behold: New Drone Footage Of Apple’s ‘Spaceship’ Campus Surfaces

Development of Apple’s upcoming ‘Campus 2’ has made some huge progress over the past year, and based on what we see right now, it looks like it will have no problem opening its doors in late 2017 to over 10,000 employees. If you haven’t taken a good look at Apple’s new HQ before, do yourself a favor and check out the latest drone footage:

While most images of this campus show the dominating circular building, there will be many other buildings scattered about, including a 100,000 sq/ft employee gym. To keep the campus landscape as clean as possible, all parking will be located underground, paving the way (no pun) for some 6,000+ trees to be planted around and inside the campus’ inner ring.

There are a number of aspects of this campus that are impressive, with one at the forefront being the unparalleled use of curved glass. When Steve Jobs pitched the idea of this campus to Cupertino officials in 2011, he said that there wasn’t a single piece of flat glass used in its construction. The glass isn’t just curved, though: it’s also enormous, and had to be custom-made in Germany.

This building wasn’t just designed to look good – it was also designed to be efficient. Inside and out, the architects of the campus made sure that the building could be as self-sufficient as possible, to reduce the amount of power required to keep the building feeling comfortable.

Of course, being a modern building, the upcoming campus is designed also to be “green”. As it stood before ground broke, 20% of the land Apple purchased for this campus was 20% landscape, whereas after the new campus opens, that will skyrocket to 80% landscape – thanks in huge part to the underground parking.

Is this campus a little overkill? Probably. But it’s also the kind of building future architects will learn from, and while Cupertino needed no further help “getting on the map”, this campus will become a shining example of architecture the world over.