Last week my wife and I were in California and had a chance to stop by Apple Park. It was a very quick visit on route to Big Sur from Sonoma Valley, so I didn’t have time to walk around the perimeter of the main Apple Park campus. Our visit was simply to the Apple Park Visitor Center.
Apple Park Visitor Center
The center has four program components, combining a cafe, roof terrace, and exhibition space to essentially an Apple Store. The building, like nearly all of Apple’s latest flagship stores, is exquisitely executed on nearly every level.
As an architect, I’ve been intensely interested in Apple Park and would one day love to visit the main building and Jobs Theater. Fingers crossed…
Pictures, Exploring and Thoughts
Apple Park Visitors Center is built of the same core materials as the main campus building featuring gigantic glass walls, glass doors, seemingly floating ceilings beautifully crafted of blond, clear-finished wood boards, and large swathes of stone on floors and walls. The whole building is framed in an olive grove gridded on both sides of the structure.
When we arrived, the afternoon light was particularly interesting as it crossed over and through the building. As you approach the building from the elevators from the free parking below, this view in image 01 is what you see.
01 – Apple Park Visitor Center through the olive tree grove. (click on image for very large sized version)
The shinney roof panels, if they are the same material as the Steve Jobs theater, would be made of carbon-fiber—and judging from the roof at the Apple Michigan Avenue store, appear to be Apple’s favorite roof material now. (see image 05) In the image above one can see the pergola structure from the roof deck above.
In the image below (02) the exhibition hall is illuminated by reflective light bouncing off what appears to be terrazzo floors onto the honey-colored wood ceiling. The ceilings at Apple Park structure are uniformly made of a specific species of maple; however, at the Michigan Avenue Store, where the detailing is identical to Apple Park buildings, they are white oak. The walls—where there are walls!—are a limestone (Serpeggiante Castagna) originating from Bari in the south of Italy.
The glass panels wrapping the entire space are a key subject to discuss in a bit. (see page 3) They are of dimensions beyond the limits beyond the majority of most standard building glass manufacturers. They also appear to be structurally supporting the roof.
02 – Apple Park Visitor Center.
Each end of the long building has a roof that cantilevers out from internally located solid structure out beyond even the glass walls. My guess is that the glass walls are structurally supportive just as they are at the Steve Jobs Theater. Over at the Jobs Theater, the glass walls support a roof that is 80.7 tons in weight. The glass walls at the Jobs Theater are the only structure to support the carbon-fiber roof. Here, quite a bit of the roof could be supported via internal structurally supportive walls or columns and cantilevered framing in the aircraft-wing like roof form.
next page: Going Inside and To The Roof
Going Inside and To The Roof
This view inside the visitor center shows that the building has linear circulation spaces along each long side of the building. The height of the glass walls is approximately 18-20 feet. Doors are located in at least three major spots along each long side, plus one to two locations at each end on the cafe side, which itself features large pivoting glass doors to open up space to the outside.
In this view I am standing at the Exhibition space looking past stair halls (left) sheathed in limestone, core spaces, then the large Apple Store space in the middle, then stair and core again and then at the very end, the Apple Cafe.
03 – Inside Apple Park Visitor Center.
I was impressed with the obvious weight of the big glass doors (you can see one in this view about 20 feet from where I was standing), which don’t rise up to the ceiling but nevertheless are large. They move quite easily despite their weight, and the quality of the door hardware—a huge subject of discussion during the construction of Apple Park—was extremely nice.
In the picture above I am standing at the far right of the Exhibition space. Towards the left center of that space is the physical model of Apple Park. They hand out iPads with AR technology which converts the photo of the model into a rendered, interactive 3D model.
04 – The exhibition space features a physical model of the entire Apple Park which you can explore with AR technology on iPads Apple hands out to you.
Let’s head up to the roof. The flooring is a decking material that I did not take the time to investigate. I was not that impressed, and it seemed Apple didn’t put the same degree of care into this particular material. I am unsure of the species, but it could be mahogany or even IPE. It had a weathering oil finish or some kind, and I expect it will weather gray nicely over time blending more with the colors of the building.
05 – From the roof deck visitors can simply chill out under the carbon-fiber fins that make up the pergola and gaze across the street to the main campus building in the distance.
In the image above the view of the Apple headquarters main building lies behind the large trees in the foreground. The plantings at Apple Park are impressive. In a few years, it will be interesting to see just how extensively lush Apple Park will look at feel.
A few notes. The roof material is incredibly shiny and made up of large curved panels with seams about 10 feet apart. I believe this is the same carbon fiber roof system used at the Steve Jobs Theater and several smaller pavilion type buildings throughout Apple Park as well as the Apple Michigan Store. A solid double-layer glass guardrail is the only thing that separates you from the roof panels.
next page: Stairs, Basement, and Notes About the Glass
Stairs and Basement Level
The stairs are quite beautiful and well-crafted, made of large stone panels and parts. It was not clear if this was the same stone as the walls, which I believe are the matching Serpeggiante Castagna limestone used at the Steve Jobs Theater. The whole stair floats off the side walls allowing light to penetrate deep into the stair all the way from the glazed stair penthouse at the roof level.
06 – From the bottom of the matching stairs that reach down to the basement level, one can see that the stone stairs feature integrated handrails carved into the stone inner wall.
Notice the little metal bar in the image above. I suppose it was meant to keep folks from walking under the rising section of the stair. The basement itself is where visitors can find restrooms and the basement, despite its limited public spaces, is serene and beautiful. One important note. There are no air registers for the AC and heating anywhere in this building. The space between the stone walls and the maple ceiling is a black recess zone which I suspect contains linear diffusers, or, perhaps the air flows through the black reveals of the maple boards themselves.
07 – This view shows the halls that lead to the restrooms at the basement level.
The stair (up) is just to my right in this image above. Spacious hallways lead visitors and staff to separate restroom facilities. The basement gets the same vertical-grain blonde (maple?) wood ceiling panels. A relentless quest for simplicity in the building is found everywhere in the visitors center, even in the restrooms themselves.
08 – From the stair landings half a flight down you can catch this view of the all-glass facade.
Coming down from the roof deck the stair landings u-turn twice and provide the visitor with this view over the guardrail. The glass walls are impressive as the roof appears to just simply float over the panes of glass and the space it helps to define.
It should be stated that at the Steve Jobs Theater the entire roof is only supported by the glass walls. And the electrical lines and water lines for the fire sprinkler system are fully located within narrow channels in the silicon joints between the glass. This does not have to be the case here, however. At the Steve Jobs Theater, a 155-foot diameter carbon fiber roof weighs 80 tons and bears entirely on the glass walls. If this is a similar structure—which I believe it is—than similar loads get transferred from core area columns and to the glass as well. You can see in image 09 below the extent of the roof cantilever over the glass walls, which must be load supporting.
Notes About the Glass
Architosh has noted before that Apple has broken records for the use of glass in buildings. This obsession with glass began many years ago with the first flagship Apple Stores. Steve Jobs and his team pushed their architects to the limit in thinking about innovative glass stairs, elevators—as in the famous cube store in New York City—floors and walls.
Most standard building glass is limited in size such that the smallest dimension can rarely exceed 60-inches in width, a standard size for heat-treating glass on high-speed furnaces at economies of scale. There are some glass fabricators that can exceed that, creating glass products at 60 – 84 inches and a few that can go even further, like Agnora in Canada which can produce glass for buildings at up to 130 inches in width and 300 inches in length. As a practicing architect, I’ve had the great pleasure to work with Agnora on a project with large glass dimensions. Working with over-sized glass has multiple complexities for just about any project. A surprising one is contractor-sided and deals with the sequencing of work as it relates to the equipment needed to lift into the place such large and heavy glass units.
Anyway, 130 x 300 inches is roughly 10 feet plus by 25 feet. That company makes the largest glass in North America for buildings and structures, but that is not who supplied glass at Apple Park.
09 – One final view of the Apple Park Visitor Center building. The ceiling and thus height of the glass is approximately 18 – 20 feet tall. Glass panels appeared to be approximately 8-9 feet wide.
Apple used a pair of German firms for its glass at Apple Park. Apple used a company named Sedak, which now can produce the world’s largest glass for buildings at sizes of up to 126 inches by 650 inches. While the width is slightly smaller than Agnora, in North America, Sedak can make glass twice as long. The glass facades at the Visitor Center are small enough to be produced by Agnora, but it seems more logical that Apple would source all the glass for the entire project from the same supplier despite more modest sizes. Sedak also can make such large pieces of glass in cold bent glass which was required not just at the round building at Apple Park but at rounded corners at the Visitor Center. (see image 09)
While Sedak produced the glass, engineering for the complex glass facades at Apple was reportedly done by another German firm Seele, a company that got its start as a glazier but today is one of the leading facade engineering firms in the world.
Note
This article was updated on 15 Aug 2018 with additional information.