Designed by Steve Jobs himself in 2011, Apple's futuristic 'Spaceship' campus is set to be unveiled this year. Originally scheduled to have opened in 2015, the building will be ready sometime between the months of March and May this year. According to a Reuters report, some former Apple employees felt that some of the building's features are reminiscent of Apple products. They pointed out that the shape of the lift buttons and even the toilet seats seem to have been inspired by the iPhone.
"They have arrived at design principles somehow through many years of experimentation, and they are faithful to those principles," architect German de la Torre who worked on the project told Reuters, explaining the phenomenon.
While few public figures are available, experts estimate the cost of the new campus to be in the vicinity of $5 billion. The building, which will soon host 14,200 Apple employees, features the largest curved glass panel ever made.
A construction manager recalled that the building team has been instructed by Apple to make the polished concrete ceiling immaculate inside out, as if it were a headphone jack in an iPhone.
Apple has a reputation for being hard to please client and it was adamant on certain design decisions such as flat doorways with no thickness around thresholds. "We spent months trying not to do that because that's time, money and stuff that's never been done before," a former construction manager said.
Reportedly, the company spent months before finalising some very small features. Holder Construction and Rudolph & Sletten, which were among the first companies to get building contracts, were asked to finalise the door handles at the very start of the project.
The project has generated almost 13,000 construction jobs until now.