In the wake of completing a massive data storage facility in North Carolina, Apple is now proposing an office building for 12,000 employees that is designed to augment its existing space in Cupertino, Calif., according to video posted to the Cupertino City Council Channel on YouTube.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs addressed the Council directly last night. Jobs showed extensive slides of the proposed facility, which is shaped like a flat doughnut, featuring an inner-campus green space in the center of the circle. At one point, Jobs said the building looks “kinda like a spaceship landed.” He said Apple is “growing like a weed,” and has outgrown its existing facilities at 1 Infinite Loop.
“It’s clear that we need to build a new campus… and that doesn’t mean we don’t need the one we’ve got, we do need it, but we need another one to augment it,” Jobs said.
In typical Apple fashion, the new facility is anything but just another office building. Jobs said he expects architecture students from all over the world would be attracted to the proposed 3.1 million-square-foot building, which is planned for a site that was the original Hewlett-Packard headquarters.
“I think we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” Jobs told the Council.
Apple currently houses around 2,600 people at 1 Infinite Loop and has supplemented that space by renting various office buildings around Cupertino, which Jobs described as “not very good buildings.”
When asked what the proposed campus would bring to the citizens of Cupertino, Jobs touted Apple’s status as the largest tax contributor in the city, as well as the influx of “talented” and “affluent” working population the company attracts.
The facility will drastically improve the existing office landscape of the property. Jobs noted that currently only 20 percent of the space is landscaped, with most of it covered by a massive parking lot. Apple would increase landscaping to 80 percent and put most of the parking underground. Additionally, the number of employees that would inhabit the space would increase by 40 percent.
Jobs said the land holds special meaning for him, recalling a time when he was 13 and called up Bill Hewlett, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and asked him for some “spare parts” that would help Jobs complete a frequency counter he was working on at the time. Hewlett did more than that; he actually gave Jobs a summer position in a division of the company that manufactured frequency counters.
Jobs said Apple hopes to move forward with the project quickly. He hopes to break ground next year, with a move-in date of 2015.
Check the full video below for Job’s presentation:
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