Apple Park
Advancing Creative Enterprise
Our founder facilitated an extraordinary collaboration between world leaders in design.
Cupertino, California
Apple
6,000,000 sq. ft.
Office, research and development campus
Partner with Foster + Partners
Challenge
When Steve Jobs launched plans for Apple Park at a meeting of the Cupertino City Council in 2011, he began simply: “Apple has grown like a weed, and we’ve always been in Cupertino.” After years of rapid expansion, the company had 25,000 employees scattered in more than 50 buildings throughout the area. Steve’s vision was for a new campus that would unite 12,000 employees in a single building, facilitating creativity and innovation, without leaving the company’s home town. In response, Apple purchased an aging corporate campus, formerly the Hewlett-Packard computer systems division. With some adjacent parcels, the property constituted 176 acres of outdated buildings surrounded mainly by parking lots. The world-leading London-based architectural firm Foster + Partners and OLIN landscape architects were selected to design Apple Park, with California partner Wolfgang Wagener acting as architect in responsible control.
Solution
With Wolfgang as a crucial intermediary, Foster + Partners engaged their international leadership in design and environmental stewardship to help achieve Apple’s goals. The entire 176-acre site was redeveloped, with state-of-the-art office, research, and development facilities immersed in a landscape that celebrates the area’s unique ecology and agricultural heritage. The circular Main Building comprises approximately 2.8 million square feet in four stories, designed to seamlessly merge interior and exterior spaces. Amenities include a striking restaurant within the Main Building, a Corporate Fitness Center (approximately 100,000 square feet), and a 1,000-seat Corporate Auditorium (approximately 120,000 square feet). Wolfgang and other members of the Foster + Partners California office assessed Apple’s real estate needs, provided master planning, programming, and workplace solutions, navigated entitlements processes, and facilitated design collaboration and construction innovation, working from the start to orchestrate this unique development.
Impact
Wolfgang helped channel the architectural excellence of Foster + Partners into the concrete, local setting of Apple’s Cupertino operations, enabling the realization of an extraordinary vision. Apple’s commitment to beauty, innovation, and ease of use, as well as to the environmental integrity of the site, informed every aspect of the development and up-leveled local capacity in the construction industry. The campus’s human-centered design provides ideal conditions for creative collaboration—an incubator for the next generations of Apple products. Net-zero-energy and climate-responsive buildings occupy a landscape of ecologically rich oak savanna. Native and drought-tolerant plants replace acres of asphalt, improving local water quality. Neighboring residents benefit from sweeping views over this thoughtfully designed terrain, while the city gains an important economic center of gravity. Apple Park represents billions of dollars of investment in Cupertino, from a world-leading employer that values its local roots.
