“Things change when a spaceship comes to town,” Kathy Chin Leong reports for The New York Times. “Tourists stroll by, whipping out their iPhones to get a photo. New businesses move in. And real estate prices go up even more.”
“Apple’s new home in Cupertino — the centerpiece being a $5 billion, four-story, 2.8 million-square-foot ring that can be seen from space and that locals call the spaceship — is still getting some final touches, and employees have just started to trickle in. The full squadron, about 12,000 people, will arrive in several months,” Leong reports. “But the development of the headquarters, a 175-acre area officially called Apple Park, has already helped transform the surrounding area.”
“In Sunnyvale, a town just across the street, 95 development projects are in the planning stages. The city manager, Deanna J. Santana, said she had never seen such action before,” Leong reports. “City officials and residents say this project is like nothing they’ve seen before. It is even bringing tourists. Onlookers snap pictures of the spaceship from the streets. TV helicopters circle above. Amateur photographers ask residents if they can stand on driveways to operate their drones, hoping to get a closer look at Apple Park. ‘I just say, ‘Hey, go ahead,” said Ron Nielsen, who lives in Birdland, a Sunnyvale neighborhood across the street from the spaceship. ‘Why not?'”
“Sunnyvale and Cupertino, like many other Silicon Valley towns, have had an extended real estate boom, as the tech industry has expanded. Prices in the area really started to rise, real estate agents and residents said, after Apple released its plans,” Leong reports. “A three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,400-square-foot ranch-style house that cost $750,000 in 2011 has doubled in price.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Change happens.
Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future. — Steve Jobs
“What about the free wifi?”
– dumbass city council member.
While singularly round building (those with no appendages) designs have a history that goes back at least to the Tholos in Classical Greece, they were all religious, public, or militarily defensive in nature, the Apple Campus is likely the first gigantic Capitalist round structure ever.
I’m intrested if anyone shows me other examples.
That is, examples of other perfectly round Capitalist architectures.
Looks like a tomb.
There are buildings that approach the round shape – the Pentagon, for example. I saw a number of links for octagonal buildings, too, although I did not follow them. But perfectly round? I have not found any so far that fit under the “capitalist” category.
So perhaps the Spaceship building might be yet another innovation under Apple.
Now watch Samsung do a cheap round one.
you mean like this one?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jun/10/terrorism.Whitehall
It’s kind of round but it’s not Capitalist; It’s a big gub’mnt building in GB.
There are several round buildings in Sydney Australia.
– https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Square. A beautiful office tower that I work in.
– 75 Darling Point Road, Darling Point. A beautiful apartment building I’d like to live in. You can see it in 3D on Apple Maps.
Enjoy!
Yes, round.
There’s the Capital Records Building in Hollywood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records_Building