He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that of Sir Norman Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the restored Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly, Jobs got so involved in the planning, both the vision and the details, that it became almost impossible to settle on a final design. This was to be his lasting edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm assigned fifty architects to the team, and every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed Jobs revised models and options. Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives.
When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was shaped like a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around a large central courtyard. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the interior had rows of office pods that allowed the sunlight to stream down the aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid meeting spaces,” he said, “and everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”
The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large conference room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building covered the table. He had made a major change. The pods would all be set back from the windows so that long corridors would be bathed in sun. These would also serve as the common spaces. There was a debate with some of the architects, who wanted to allow the windows to be opened. Jobs had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. “That would just allow people to screw things up,” he declared. On that, as on other details, he prevailed.
When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed joked that the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed the comment as reflecting the mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he mentioned the comment to the architects. “Unfortunately, once I’ve told you that, you’re never going to be able to erase that image from your mind,” he said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been changed to a simple circle.
The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the building. All would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been fascinated with glass, and his experience demanding huge custom panes for Apple’s retail stores made him confident that it would be possible to make massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was of the orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a natural manner, with six thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs recalled. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley.”
By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which would hold more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He decided to do so in a quiet and unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino City Council on the day after he had announced iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson, who had developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had decided to accept an offer to be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s house in the morning to discuss his departure. Then Jobs and I went into Palo Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called Fraiche, where he talked animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he was driven to Santa Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel executives, where they discussed the possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland Coliseum, and Jobs had considered going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans to the Cupertino Council.
Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same black sweater he had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a podium with clicker in hand and spent twenty minutes showing slides of the design to council members. When a rendering of the sleek, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen, he paused and smiled. “It’s like a spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he added, “I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world.”