Apple Wants a Spaceship-shaped Cupertino Campus

On June 7, Steve Jobs presented his plans for a new giant campus that looks like a spaceship to the Cupertino City Council.

Photo:www.digitaltrends.com

“Apple is growing like a weed,” said the Apple‘s CEO. “And as you know, we’ve always been in Cupertino.”

The company rents buildings scattered throughout the city. The plan for the future campus puts 12,000 to 13,000 employees inside a single four-story oval building covered with panes of curved glass.

Jobs, who has recently unveiled the new iOS5 and other Apple software news, presented the case of what he calls ‘a shot at building the best office building in the world’ in a very convincing way.

By moving parking underground, 80% of the 150-acre property will be landscaped. The lead arborist from Stanford is to fill it with 6,000 trees, and the company would build its own ‘energy center’ power source. The campus would use its own natural gas generator as its primary source of power and the city’s power grid only as a backup. The building includes an auditorium for conferences, and Jobs suggests that’s where Apple could hold its big events instead of renting out space in San Francisco. Apple wants to launch the building next year, and move in by 2015.

Jobs didn’t miss the chance to remind the panel that Apple pays more taxes than any other company in Cupertino. “We’d like to continue to stay here and pay taxes,” he said. “Because if we can’t, we have to go someplace like Mountain View.”