Apple Campus 2 designer says new HQ was inspired by Stanford campus and London squares, and other news for March 4, 2014
Norman Foster, the designer behind Apple's "Spaceship" Campus 2, has given a wide ranging interview to Architectural Record about the inspirations and design process behind Apple's future HQ. In the beginning stages, Foster planned the look and feel of Campus 2 with Steve Jobs, who has a love of the Main Quad on Stanford's campus. With that as a starting place, Foster began searching out other areas that incorporated open green spaces in their planning, notably the famous squares of London where houses encircle a green space in their center. As Foster tells Architectural Record:
We did a continuous series of base planning studies. One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London. And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus. These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle-essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails.
Apple's Campus 2 is expected to be completed sometime in 2016 and will house 12,000 Apple employees.
In other news:
Yesterday Goldman Sachs announced Apple's Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer will be joining Goldman's board of directors, effective immediately. That was followed shortly by today's announcement that Oppenheimer will leave Apple this September, after 18 years with the company, and be replaced by Luca Maestri, Apple's vice president of Finance and its corporate controller.
Pandora has issued a statement to MacRumors acknowledging it was not included in the first round of third-party apps that are CarPlay compatible, but it still considers Apple a "valued partner."
The Verge says Microsoft wants to expand Xbox Live across multiple devices platforms, including iOS and Android, to become a Game Center-like hub for gamers.
AppleInsider points to a new Apple patent that would allow iPhone users to screen live voicemail messages as they are being left in the user's voicemail.
