As we all know, in the past two years, due to the epidemic, Apple's conference has changed from offline to online, and has taken the form of advance video recording and timed live broadcast.
This change has made this globally watched "Science and Technology Spring Festival Gala" largely miss a part of the sense of presence, but it is also fortunate to let us peek into what the inside of the apple orchard looks like.
Yes, it is this building that resembles a Hakka tulou (fog). ▼
After the online conference was held, Apple's camera and animation team did everything in its power to show the space inside and outside Apple Park in the background, transition, special effects, etc.
The most amazing of these is the idea that Cook incarnated as a mission impossible and stole his own M1 chip.
The scenes seen to the audience are unobstructed, but in fact, Apple's internal secrecy for Apple Park is still in place.
At the press conference, specific location information such as laboratories and office areas was confused through clever transitions, and it was impossible to distinguish between east, west, south, and north in the park.
In addition to the Apple employees who work inside, only a few invited media outlets in the past can approach the circular building at the annual WWDC or autumn conference.
Speaking of which, the two dog classmates of the bad review TV
I was fortunate enough to receive this invitation in 2019. ▼
Yes, just close.
Apple only opened the visitor center and the Jobs Theater outside the Circular Building to the media, and it is probably so far from the place where the iPhone and Macbook are actually designed and developed...
If it weren't for the employees of Apple's headquarters, there would really be no way to walk in.
Interestingly, in December last year, a French TV station called TF1 did not know how to get Permission from Apple and entered the interior of the Circle Building for interviews.
Judging from the online disclosure of just over 4 minutes of interview content, Apple restricted the shooting area of TF1 TV station in the ring building, so the place where it can be filmed is roughly the same as the scene of Apple's conference.
According to the reporter interviewed, after entering the building, he could feel Apple's corporate culture of "confidentiality" at every moment, the doors in the office building were mostly closed, and every scene shooting had to be negotiated.
TF1 TV is nominally in, but the content of the filming is still under Apple's control, and other details are still unknown.
Tony himself wondered what it was like inside Apple Park.
After searching the Internet for information and flipping through a bunch of biographies (mostly Jobs), Tony actually found some early concept drawings and architectural drawings of Apple Park.
After his research, Tony found that the new headquarters was much more important to Apple than expected.
Let's first take a look at Jobs himself, what his original vision for Apple Park was.
Fast forward to 2004, when Jony Ive, the former apple designer who designed the iPod, iPhone and iMac, and Jobs were walking together in Hyde Park, England, they had the idea of building a new headquarters for Apple.
Jobs wanted to create an iconic new campus for Apple, and he hoped the new headquarters would provide a better office environment for employees than they do now, just like a park or a university campus.
The new headquarters will also carry Apple's spirit of simplicity and innovation, which will continue from generation to generation.
This demand sounds quite picturesque at first, but Jobs is obviously not just talking, and the idea of building a new Apple campus at that time was as important as iPhone and iPad, which changed people's lives.
In 2009, Jobs officially invited structuralist architect Norman Foster to create a new Apple Park.
Millennium Bridge, Capital Airport Terminal 3, HSBC Headquarters,
All are masterpieces of this master builder. ▼
Foster and his team are known for their high productivity and high standards in the industry, and Jobs decided to work with him, focusing on his rich experience and the high implementation of the solution.
Pulling together Ivey, the design of Apple's new campus began in full swing at that moment.
Jobs himself was particularly interested in this matter, and in the original design plan, they developed a design concept called "pod".
Simply put, the office in the form of a pod allows employees to think independently while also retaining a space where they can fully exchange their ideas.
In the early concept, the pod was made of a patchwork of offices, one office can meet the office of 1-2 people, and the left and right offices can communicate with each other while ensuring closure.
Jobs also polished the details of the office, requiring that the door handles must be made of the same aluminum material as the MacBook, and that they cannot be connected by screws.
The desk must be raised and lowered, and the buttons that control the lifting and lowering should be designed to be convex and concave, so that there is no need to bend down to check the buttons.
At the same time, the building itself had to retain a certain amount of mystery to fit Apple's long-standing culture of secrecy.
It sounds like this requirement is still quite in line with the positioning of Apple's headquarters, but Tony feels that this concept is based on the construction of any religious site, as if it also makes sense.
In short, under Jobs's idea, Norman Foster and his team opened their minds and designed strange architectural forms for the new headquarters, including irregular shapes, Möbius rings, clovers, propellers, and so on.
Design sketches of various morphological evolutions. ▼
In the end, the scheme of clover form was handed to Jobs by foster's team, and the ring design of three semi-circles ensured that every Apple employee who worked indoors could get the sun.
Jobs was so happy with the plan that he went back and immediately shared it with his family.
His son Reed joked after seeing the plan, he felt that the design of the clover headquarters looked very much like "Big Dick" from a certain angle in the air.
However, it was his son's complaint that led to the failure of this plan that was highly likely to be adopted.
Although Jobs himself did not care much about the joke, he told the design team about his son's evaluation of the clover scheme.
The team reacted immediately: Finished, the more you look at this thing, the more it looks like that...
Because as long as there is a person who has formed a bad impression of "Big Dick" in his heart, it will be disastrous for the image of Apple as a company.
After much deliberation, the design team finally modified the scheme to the style of the "ring spacecraft" we see now.
Tony had the privilege of figuring out some of the interiors of Apple Park from early Apple Park design drawings and model buildings.
Judging from the overall planning plan of Apple Park, the ring main building of Apple Park is like Apple with a large home button embedded in the ground.
As a service function, the Jobs Theater, the Visitor Center and the large parking lot are scattered around the perimeter and maintain a certain distance from the main building, avoiding outside interference with the office area.
Employees will enter the main building directly from the underground passage on the outside, and in the design of the moving line, employees, visitors, and service personnel have their own set of routes.
If Tony guessed correctly,
Apple employees should normally go to work from this entrance
According to the façade of the campus building that flowed out in the early days, we can roughly see that the apple park main building is roughly divided into four floors above ground office area, as well as two underground internal parking lots and equipment rooms.
The connection between the floors of the building is mainly based on stairs, and the low floors and the circular distribution of office areas give people the feeling that it is not too different from the university library.
So it seems that Jobs built a school for Apple's classmates... ( Lei Jun tone bushi )
After the overall building was basically determined, Jobs planned to give the building a technology tree.
First of all, the most eye-catching thing on the main floor of Apple Park is the restaurant with its own giant glass door.
The two sliding glass doors feature the world's largest curved glass, with a single door 16m high, 28m wide and weighing close to 200 tons.
It fills the four floors of the entire building, and every noon lunch, the two huge doors will slowly open through the motors hidden underground, and there is no noise during the whole process.
The environmental protection concept that Apple has been emphasizing in the past two years has been reflected in many places in the construction of Apple Park.
Take the air conditioner of the energy consumer, Apple wants to try not to use the air conditioner on the main building of the ring as much as possible.
Jobs hated fans and air conditioners, and opening windows and ventilation was a troublesome thing for him, so at the beginning of the project, he thought about whether he could let the building body breathe on its own and regulate the air.
In contrast to enclosed buildings that tightly control internal temperatures, the Apple Park main building features air ducts that circulate air from the outside.
To achieve the "breath of the building", Apple contacted the aerodynamic experts of the F1 car to find a way to guide the air in the underside of the eaves, and then exhale the warm air outside like a chimney.
After the air circulation system is working, the heating or cooling system in the building is activated only when the temperature is at an extreme state, theoretically without turning on the air conditioner for 9 months a year.
In addition, the solar panels on the roof and the various fruit trees planted in the park also highlight Apple Park's commitment to environmental protection.
The more environmentally friendly the more expensive... ▼
Apple's removal of the charging head in the iPhone packaging has certainly given the industry a bad head, but it has to be said that they have spent a lot of effort on their own building environmental protection investment.
Unfortunately, Jobs was not able to see the completion of this exquisite new headquarters in the end, but every corner of the park left traces of his thinking.
Jobs inspected the site before his death. ▼
To put it mildly, Apple Park may be the kind of workplace jobs he looked like after he became a building, a workplace he poured a lot of energy into building in the last months of his life.
Tony feels that Apple Park may be a witness for Apple in 50 years, or even 100 years.
And for all people who love technology and love life, its existence may be a giant home button that can come up with a steady stream of ideas to connect the present and the future.
Author: Jihao Editor: Polygon Line
Images, sources:
WIRED ：Apple’s New Campus : An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership
Foster+Partners ：Apple Park
YouTube ：Apple Campus 2
YouTube ：Apple Park AR a majestic experience