If we know the sublime and disproportionate Apple Park or its predecessor, the Infinite Loop campus, Apple has crossed many other sites in Cupertino, the city where the company has chosen home since the end of the 1970s. Multiple cross places that also shape the narration of one of the best known brands in the world.
Apple’s story began in 1976 in a garage in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne are in the home of the first parents, located in 2066 Crist Dr in Los Altos, to live from their technological innovations. A founding myth for Apple. If this is where the trio will define its first orientations, its first innovations, no product will be created there.
HE The garage served as a symbolic place to the genesis of the brand instead of a real operating center. Above all, it will be an assembly workshop for design or production. Apple I and Apple II were designed by Steve Wozniak At home, sometimes even in his office in Hewlett-Packard, where he worked at that time. Everything really started for Apple in this direction, now owned by an individual and a place of life away from the shadow of the brand.
Wayne is then 41 years old when he joins forces with two 20 -year -old young people. He will write the Apple I instruction manual and draw the first Apple logo. A company where only … There are 12 days left. On April 12, 1976, it reveals 10% of Apple shares that it has for $ 800. The story tends to forget the third man in the case that has undoubtedly lost the occasion throughout life. Let the jobs and Wozniak continue the adventure without it. The two men ended up leaving the garage in 1977 to join Cupertino and become a formal business. They will no longer leave the city.
A garage in the founding myth
The first offices outside the Jobs houses will be inaugurated in 20863 Stevens Creek Blvd, back from a great passer -by -By Avenue, at the bottom of a mini industrial area without relief. Apple chose Cupertino, because the city is in the heart of an expanding technological strength, from Mountain View to Palo Alto, where the first companies begin to flourish. Apple grows, also grows and, in 1981, migrated its facilities in Bandley Drive, a fairly harmless street in Cupertino. Today, it has colorful apple logos every 10 minutes and Apple Drive could rename, since the company always occupies buildings in its inheritance.
It is here that Macintosh will develop and will see the daylight in 1984 to revolutionize it. Here also that Apple’s corporate identity is structured: culture of innovation, distinctive design, disruptive marketing.
After a period of growth and innovation, Steve Jobs left the company in 1985, pushed outside the CEO of then John Sculley, a pragmatic man and a marketing that then wants to control better projects and finance. Man, he had Pepsi-Cola deficiency to advance the business. Jobs wants to continue innovating at all costs, Sculley does not accept Macintosh’s disappointing beginnings. He obtained the departure of the co -founder company that will return there until 1997 after having founded Next and bought a small animation company that renamed Pixar.
Sculley wants to print his brand and for that, he decides a new headquarters in line with his company’s vision. He wants to centralize all employees and then exploded in several buildings. He wants to rationalize it too. In 1993, he installed Apple in what will become its site for more than 20 years: infinite loop.
The company is still faithful to Santa Clara County and its group of technological talents. The campus takes its name from a programming term (an infinite loop as an endless code) and is a humorous reference to Apple’s obsessive passion for its products and continuous innovation, the development cycle. It is the most institutional and less visionary apple that occupies its neighborhoods. But, without his creative spirit, he lost his strategic sense and his sense of innovation. It will be the key to the return for the great door of Steve Jobs.
In 1997, he took advantage of Apple’s acquisition of Next to resume the orders and history of Apple, where he left it. Innovations and successes are linked (the IMAC in 1998, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010) and Steve Jobs wants a place that responds to its vision, so that daily products design as the work environment of its employees. He thinks of a much bigger campus.
Apple Park: The project of a life
Infinite Loop was an infinite loop, he wants a perfect circle to show that Apple is established and back in the foreground. And all this to last. Something curved, fluid and alive, perfect as a circle. It will be a Dantesque project and that of its last years.
And everything is crazy in this project: 71 ha of the field, $ 5 billion in costs and 12,000 employees that will be welcome. The earth is specifically concretized. Almost 80% of the site will be returned to nature, thousands of trees of replanting local species, protected from flora and fauna.
The buildings are made of carbon and glass fibers, covered with 65,000 m2 of photovoltaic panels to supply low consumption LED lamps. Everything must operate 100% to renewable energies. Because the idea of works, and defended before the authorities to have the authorization to build, was to make it one of the most friendly sites with the energy in the world.
Apple Park is a manifesto, radical in its architecture, but with concern about the smallest detail, mix nature and technology. “A campus born from a luminous imagination,” said Jony Ive, the great designer of Apple’s main creations and always work acolytes. Above all, it will be its inheritance for the company that has coincidental and its indelible footprint. When employees took their neighborhoods at Apple Park in April 2017, it was without Steve Jobs who died in October 2011. Almost 15 years later, Apple, soon in its fifty years, has become the most powerful brand in the world. His dream has come true and his shadow looms again and again on the scene as in history.
Source: BFM TV
