Apple’s Spaceship

Popular Science gets a tour of the new Apple Spaceship, Campus 2

Three miles from Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters, the tech giant is building something as massive as its own global reach: Apple’s Campus 2. The Spaceship, as many have nicknamed it, is over one mile in circumference—that’s wider than the Pentagon. When it’s completed later this year it will house 13,000 employees— including design grandmaster Jony Ive, who helped sculpt the iPhone, and CEO Tim Cook, who helps keep profits in the “billions-with-a-B” territory.

Campus 2 will run entirely on clean energy, powered by renewable sources. But what’s really grabbed our attention are the thousands of panels of curved window panes—the largest pieces of structural glass ever made—that will encase Apple’s mothership. Equally cool are the 60,000 pounds of hollow concrete slabs that allow the building to “breathe,” bolstering its eco-friendly qualities. With so many futuristic features, we wanted to get a closer look. Here’s what we found.

THE NUMBERS

176: Acres the new Campus will occupy
1.23 million: Square footage of glass involved in the project
3,000: Approximate total number of glass panes used
7,000: Weight, in pounds, of the heaviest panes of vertical glass
4,300: Concrete slabs needed for the floor and ceiling
60,000: How many pounds the heaviest concrete slabs weigh
75: Percentage of renewable energy that campus itself will produce during peak daytime hours
16: Megawatts of power produced by rooftop solar panels
5 billion: Total cost, in dollars, this project is reported to approximately cost (Apple declined to comment on an official figure)

Impressive.