By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Apple Inc. co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs will preserve his design legacy with the company's plans for a new spaceship-like building, a design that is likely to be approved and one that will put Silicon Valley on the architectural map.
On Tuesday night, Jobs, who is on medical leave, made another winning presentation to the city council of Cupertino, Calif., where Apple /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL +0.06% is based. He presented a futuristic design for a new glass building to house up to 13,000 employees, a glass circle surrounded by green trees, and powered by cleaner energy, that sits like a spaceship.
"Definitely, the mothership has landed here in Cupertino," Mayor Gilbert Wong said, smiling after Jobs's presentation.
In addition, the surrounding landscape will harken back to Silicon Valley's past, when it was known as the Valley of the Heart's Delight, and include apricot orchards. Jobs plans to almost double the number of trees on the campus, which totals 150 acres. See Apple news story here.
"This land is kind of special to me," Jobs said, adding that Apple had purchased the campus from Hewlett-Packard Co. /quotes/zigman/229301/quotes/nls/hpq HPQ -0.59% and he briefly told the city about his phone conversation with H-P co-founder Bill Hewlett when he was about 13 years old, who he called up asking for some parts for a school project. "Hewlett and Packard were my idols." See Tech Tales column on Apple buying rest of H-P campus.
Jobs did not yet mention who the company's architects are, but said they are "the best in the world." The Apple spaceship campus, though, is believed to be designed by British architect Norman Foster, known for his machine-inspired industrial aesthetic. One of his iconic corporate buildings, for example, is the glass-paneled bullet-shaped London offices of Swiss Reinsurance Co. /quotes/zigman/283042 SWCEF -0.47% , also nicknamed the Gherkin, which stands out in the city's skyline. An Apple spokesman declined to comment and Foster + Partners did not respond to queries.
"I think we have the shot at building the best office building in the world," Jobs told the Cupertino City Council. "I really think architecture students will come here to see this, I do think it could be that good." See Steve Jobs's presentation here.
Indeed, in Silicon Valley, the land of tilt-up office structures and research and development parks dominated by asphalt parking lots, Jobs is probably right. There are not many structures in Silicon Valley — with the possible exception of Oracle Inc.'s /quotes/zigman/76584/quotes/nls/orcl ORCL -1.85% series of cylindrical glass towers that reference either databases or hard disk drives in Redwood City, Calif. — that evoke the area's technological prowess.
"We have seen these office parks with lots of buildings," Jobs said. "And they get pretty boring pretty fast." The Apple design is four stories high, about the same height as the company's headquarters at One Infinite Loop. It will include underground parking and another four-story parking facility, an auditorium for events and product launches, and a big cafe. It will be powered by its own clean energy center and Apple will use the electrical grid as backup power.
The circular building will be mostly made of glass. Jobs cited Apple's expertise in building sleek stores around the world as enabling it to develop specialized curved glass panels to create the spaceship effect.
Because Apple plans to keep the structure at a fairly low height, that will probably help with the city approval process.
"We do expect it to be a straight forward process," said Rick Kitson, public and environmental affairs director for the city of Cupertino. "We don't expect any surprises. They know how things work in Cupertino. We know that they have a very aggressive timeline. And above and beyond that, this is a company that fundamentally understands the value of design."
If the city approves Apple's futuristic design, Jobs's legacy as a major force in the tech business and in design is likely assured. While he did incur the wrath of architectural preservationists for his destruction of his home in the leafy hamlet of Woodside, a mansion designed by George Washington Smith, the father of the Spanish Colonial revival style, the Apple spaceship campus will likely be heralded by the architectural community as radical.
"This is not going to be a tilt-up office complex," Kitson said. "This is a statement."
That, it is safe to say, is an understatement.
Therese Poletti is a senior columnist for MarketWatch in San Francisco.
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