Technology History | Apple Park Visitor Center — The Ring Was Sold to a City Council First

Steve Jobs spent the evening of 7 June 2011 asking a suburban city council for permission to build a circle.

He stood at the podium in Cupertino Community Hall with renderings of a four-storey ring holding more than 12,000 employees, and told the council he thought Apple had a shot at building the best office building in the world.

The numbers he gave were specific: about 2.8 million square feet of floor space, a 176-acre site, and roughly 80 per cent of it planted, with the parking pushed underground.

He also made a smaller argument that mattered locally. The site was an asphalt sea of Hewlett-Packard parking lots, and he offered to plant thousands of trees in place of it.

It was his last public appearance. He died on 5 October 2011, four months later, long before anything was built.

Norman Foster's practice, Foster + Partners, carried the design through. Employees began moving into the completed ring in April 2017, six years after the council meeting.

The campus does not admit visitors, which is why this pin sits across Tantau Avenue rather than on the building itself.

This Visitor Center opened to the public on Friday 17 November 2017, a two-storey pavilion under a cantilevered carbon fibre roof that rests on stone cores with no columns holding up its edges.

Its purpose is a view. The stairs lead to a roof terrace that is the only place a member of the public can stand and see the main building, across an olive grove and part of the 9,000 drought-resistant trees planted on the grounds.

Inside, a milled model of the whole campus sits under augmented-reality iPads, so the ring can be inspected in the way Jobs inspected it in 2011: as an object on a table, viewed from above.

Admission is free, the café is open to anyone, and the store sells campus-branded goods sold nowhere else.

Cover: the Visitor Center at dusk, October 2018. The second photograph shows the campus model in its exhibition space.

Photos: Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.