With a buried car park, 7,000 trees, and jogging and bicycle trails, the iPhone maker's new headquarters will take on Steve Jobs' vision to be more like a town park than an office park.

Apple plans to turn a "sea of asphalt" into a green space.

Stanford University's campus has a large central quad full of plants, flowers, trees, and pedestrian walkways -- this was Apple late co-founder Steve Jobs' vision for the design of the company's upcoming futuristic spaceship-like campus.

Architecture firm Foster + Partners is heading the project -- which is slated to be done in 2016 -- and the firm's founder, Norman Foster, recently spoke to Architectural Record about the thinking behind the new headquarters.

Jobs laid out plans for the campus in 2011. The facility is expected to have four stories and span a whopping 2.8 million square feet. Apple said in 2011 that it hopes to have 12,000 people on the campus -- up from about 2,800 in its current headquarters.

Before Apple took over the land, Hewlett-Packard had offices there. According to Foster, "the Apple building will occupy the site much more tightly than what was there." This means there will be far more open space for plants and trees. In fact, Apple has said that the headquarters will be 80 percent landscape with more than 7,000 trees.

The headquarters was first referred as a "spaceship" by Jobs himself, who said that it'll look "a bit like a spaceship landed." The round building is meant to emulate a town square with buildings encircling a park. Foster said that his firm did a series of planning studies for creating such a structure.

"These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle -- essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past," he said. "The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails."

This isn't to say there won't be cars at Apple's new campus -- they'll just be hidden from view in a buried car park. That way, "you won't look out of your window and see row after row of parked cars," Foster said.

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Apple's 'spaceship' campus architect dishes details

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A landscape engineer and architecture company will hold an open house the morning of March 6 to gather students and staffs input on new patio designs for the Hub.

By the time classes begin in the fall, students will be able to use an expanded an improved patio area already located on the west side of the Hub. Ames-based company Bolton & Menk will hold an open house on the patio from 9 a.m. to noon, weather permitting. Otherwise, the open house will be held in the library.

The existing is pretty worn down and does not satisfy the needs of how active the interior is now with the new Caribou and the new food services, said Sam Kessel, landscape architect for Bolton & Menk.

Chris Strawhacker, landscape architect for Iowa State who is helping facilitate the project, said the maintenance is an issue for the space. The new space will include more paved space, easier for snow removal and for students walking through the area.

More importantly, the open house will provide students with the opportunity to influence the three design concepts and advocate for their own needs of the patio space.

People can stop and look over [the plans] to give feedback to the designers, Strawhacker said. Theyre going to provide their input on what they like, what they dont like about the different concepts. The design team will take those ideas and kind of build them into one final concept.

Different design concepts will be displayed at the open house, and students will be able to speak directly to designers. Kessel said it is important to them to get the students opinions.

Within each concept we have different elements, and we are looking for students input on what they like and dislike how it will fit their needs the best, Kessel said. We want to be able to show their input in the design.

The three design concepts differ in terms of shapes, Kessel said. One of the designs focuses on rectangular shapes, another on arches. Each concept includes increased seating areas and new plant material.

Kessel said one design has a leaning rail and standing tables to bring a coffee shop atmosphere to the patio.

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Summer renovation will improve patio at the Hub

Bjarke Ingels, founder of the architectural group, BIG, that won the Kimball Art Center's architectural design contest in 2012, responded by email to The Park Record's questions about the revised design.

Park Record: The previous design was drawn from the Coalition Mine Building, What inspired the most recent design, was there something specific that triggered this shape?

Bjarke Ingels: We have attempted to create a design that draws from the sloping topography of Main Street and the encounter between the modern functionalist architecture of the Kimball Garage and the regional vernacular style of the mountain architecture. Our competition design evoked the "ghost" of the Coalition Mine Building, our new design is proportioned to remain within the constraints of the existing rules and regulations. The encounter between horizontal floors and the sloping site has created some really interesting spaces within the museum as well as created its external character -- a simple volume lifted to reveal the life and art within.

PR: How do you feel about the Kimball Art Center's decision not to pursue the design that won the competition?

Bjarke Ingels: We have worked with Kimball long and hard to find a way to create a constructive dialog with the city in the hopes that we could realize the intentions of the competition design. Once it became clear that we needed to stay within the existing regulations we simply had no other alternative than to take a step back and deal with the new situation. The Kimball and BIG did the only thing possible, and now I think we have arrived at a design that can be just as striking a contribution to Part City's streetscape, if only a lot more intimate in scale than our first sketches.

PR: Did you consider pulling out of the project in Park City when the original design was rejected?

Bjarke Ingels: Robin Marrouche and her entire board are a really passionate and devoted client and the Kimball plays a key role in the cultural landscape of Park City at a crucial location at the heart of the town. A great client for a great program on a great spot in a great city. Of course we can get something incredible out of such a setup even if we have had to start over as a necessary part of the process.

PR: What are some of your company's most recent projects?

BI: We are equally busy on both sides of the Atlantic right now. We have been selected to do a master plan for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., attempting to improve the cultural facilities around some of the most historically precious parts of the Smithsonian campus. Meanwhile, we have just won the competition for the "City of the Human Body" a science center and museum in Montpelier in southern France that celebrates all aspects of the human body ranging from medicine and anatomy to dance, sculpture and other artistic expressions.

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Architect Bjarke Ingels describes revised design

One of the most overlooked factors in the spaceship-like ring design of Apple's forthcoming "Campus 2" is that the building is expected to house some 12,000 employees in a single (albeit enormous) structure -- about the same as Hewlett-Packard, the previous occupants of the land, house in more than 26 buildings formerly on the property. Chief Architect Norman Foster has recently revealed more details about the building's origins.

In addition to housing a staggering number of workers in a single building, the new headquarters will also accomplish this feat using only 13 percent of the space HP used. Foster spoke with the Architectural Record about Apple's new HQ and some of his other well-known projects, including London's Millennium Bridge and "Gherkin" tower, Berlin's Reichstag Dome, Beijing Airport's Terminal 3 and France's Millau Viaduct, among many others. He has long experience working with curved glass, a key ingredient in Campus 2's ring design, and creating spaces on a large scale that feel open and yet communicate a sense of going somewhere rather than wandering.

In the overview of his career, Foster spent some time talking specifically about Apple's Campus 2 and about its inspirations, which largely came from his client, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Influences on the design can be seen both in Foster's airport work and from Jobs, whom Foster said drew a reference to the Main Quad plaza at Stanford University. While not circular, the quad gives students an open resting spot with islands of palm trees and other flora, surrounded by buildings as one might see in the great plazas of Rome.

"One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London," Foster told the magazine. "And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus." The sentiment fits in with Foster's habit of incorporating outdoor influences and spaces into his designs, often through the use of huge glass ceilings or faades.

Another influence on the design that came directly from Jobs, he said, was the desire by Jobs for the aesthetic of both the building and the land around it to reflect back on the less-developed California of Jobs' youth, when agriculture was one of the leading industries of the area where he grew up and had a big influence on life in general there. Jobs himself worked on various farms as a teenager and college student, and was periodically known to go on all-fruit diets.

"These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle-essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape," Foster said, "and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails."

Apple CEO Tim Cook has expressed hopes that the project will be complete sometime in 2016. The costs of the project have mushroomed from an initial estimate just under $3 billion to over $5 billion, but in the meantime numerous refinements and additional modifications have been made, including more above-ground parking (that will double as a solar collection energy factory), a larger underground "Town Hall" auditorium for future presentations, a visitor's center and bus depot for employee transit and more.

by MacNN Staff

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Architect of Apple Campus 2 reveals Jobs' influence

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The gardens at historic Villa Artemis on Thursday night won the third-annual Lesly S. Smith Landscape Award, given by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.

Nievera Williams Design created the extensive landscaping as part of a recent and extensive renovation undertaken at the North End estate. The oceanfront Villa Artemis, at 656 N. Ocean Blvd., was completed in 1917 for the Guest family and has been owned for several decades by members of the Rosenthal family.

Landscape architect Mario Nievera and his business partner Keith Williams collaborated on the landscape design, which respects the estates original understated grandeur but emphasizes updated plant choices, Nievera said.

Michael and Jane Rosenthal Horvitz live in the estates main house, while her sister, Cynthia Rosenthal Boardman, occupies the newly built guesthouse.

Boardman, Nievera and Williams attended the award presentation during a Preservationist Club dinner at the foundations headquarters on Peruvian Avenue. The Horvitzes were unable to attend.

DARRELL HOFHEINZ

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Gardens at historic Villa Artemis win landscape award