A single building for for 12000 people... 90% less parket
"...the word spectacular would be an understatement..."
YouTube - Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council (6/7/11)
Apple 'Spaceship' campus site special to Steve Jobs due to HP connection
"So we've got a plan that lets us stay in Cupertino. And we went out and we bought some land and this land is kind of special, to me.
When I was 13, I think, I called up –- Hewlett and Packard were my idols –- and I called up Bill Hewlett, 'cause he lived in Palo Alto and there were no unlisted numbers in the phone book, which gives you a clue to my age.
And he picked up the phone and I talked to him and I asked him if he'd give me some spare parts for something I was building called a frequency counter. And he did, but in addition that, he gave me something way more important -- he gave me a job that summer.
A summer job at Hewlett-Packard, right here on -- in Santa Clara, right here off 280, the division that built frequency counters.
And I was in heaven.
Well, right around that exact moment in time, Hewlett and Packard themselves were walking on some property over here in Cupertino, in Pruneridge, and they ended up buying it.
And they built their computer systems division there. And as Hewlett-Packard has been shrinking lately, they decided to sell that property and we bought it.
We bought that and we bought some adjacent property that all used to be apricot trees, apricot orchards and we've got about 150 acres.
And we would like to put a new campus on that so that we can stay in Cupertino.
And we've come up -- we've hired some great architects to work with, some of the best in the world, I think. And we've come up with a design that puts 12,000 people in one building.
When you think about that, that's rather odd. 12,000 people in a building, in one building. But, we've seen these office parks with lots of buildings and they get pretty boring pretty fast. So, we'd like to do something better than that."
"I think what we're going to end up doing is making the energy center our primary source of power, because we can generate power with natural gas and other ways that can be cleaner and cheaper, and use the grid as our backup," Jobs said. "We think that makes more sense."
