Tech

PHOTOS: Here's all the progress Apple's made on its spaceship campus — the 'best office building in the world'

Kif Leswing

2016-02-04T20:23:58Z

applecampus01_stevejobs — Steve Jobs turned a Cupertino City Council meeting into a keynote on June 7, 2011. Youtube / Cupertino City Council

If everything goes according to plan, Apple will complete its new $5 billion "spaceship" campus this year. It's been a long time coming.

Steve Jobs once said that the new campus meant Apple had "a shot at building the best office building in the world."

Fast-forward to today, and the latest footage shows that most of the earthwork, started in 2014, has been completed. Now construction workers have started to install large panels of curved glass on what the company has described as the "greenest building on the planet."

When Apple's Campus 2 is finished, it will house more than 13,000 employees over 18 acres, and it will include a massive fitness center as well as a state-of-the-art auditorium for Apple keynote presentations.

Here's a look at how far Apple's new campus has come, and what it will look like when it's all finished.

Here's the entire campus, in one shot. This shot was taken by a drone piloted by Duncan Sinfield in February 2016.

Here's what the construction site looked like in May 2014, shortly after most existing buildings had been cleared out.

All of the major landscaping work was completed in 2015.

Now Apple only needs to finish the building, which it will do by "late 2016," barring any additional setbacks.

Then it was time to assemble the building's exterior.

The building's structure has been nearly completed, according to the latest aerial image provided to the city of Cupertino by Apple.

All four planned aboveground floors have been completed, and Apple is starting to add the glass that will make up the building's exterior.

According to Seele, Apple's glass supplier, the building will use "something like six kilometers of glass."

Glass makes up the majority of the exterior of Campus 2, and was a major part of Jobs' original design.

Eventually, the roof will be covered with solar panels.

applecampus_feb2016_eventuallycoveredwithsolarroofs

The scale of the construction is overwhelming.

Not only will the campus give Apple employees a place to work, but it will also include a state-of-the-art auditorium for holding product presentations.

"We’ve got an auditorium, cause we put on presentations, much like we did yesterday but we have to go to San Francisco to do them," Jobs said in 2011.

Here's a closer look inside the auditorium during construction.

Here's a peek at some of the plans that Apple is working off of.

This is the most detailed depiction of where everything will eventually end up. Note the fairly large fitness center in the northwest corner of the lot, the ample parking near the freeway, and the corporate auditorium with direct access from the road.

Apple's new campus is only about a mile away from its existing headquarters at One Infinite Loop.

Before Apple purchased the land that it's building its new campus on, it was a campus for Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard.

HP building where Apple campus used to be

HP's advanced products campus was significantly more architecturally conventional than what Apple's building. Apple tore the building down in 2013.

Apple Campus 2 has come a long way since Steve Jobs originally announced the plans for the campus during his last public appearance at a Cupertino city council meeting.

Apple first tipped that it wanted to build a big campus in 2006, before the iPhone came out. But the firm plans that the company continues to follow were revealed in 2011 by former CEO Steve Jobs in one of his last public appearances, at a Cupertino City Council meeting. "It's a little like a spaceship landed," Jobs said. Watch the video here.

Here's what Apple wants it to look like when it's done:

The interior of the spaceship will feature a wide-open space for employees to take lunch or enjoy a little bit of nature.

The campus is designed to be light and airy.

Apple plans to finish its campus by the end of the year, presumably aiming to move in in 2017.

Apple